Ghost station, p.18
Ghost Station, page 18
Startled, she twists around in her chair to see Severin lingering in the doorway, frowning at her in concern.
It loosens something tight within her. “Do you ever feel like you’re not enough?” she asks, the words escaping without her permission. Exhaustion has taken down her filter. “Like you’ll never be able to do enough to make up for the past, for what you can’t change, no matter how hard you try?”
His expression hardens. “I didn’t come here for a counseling—”
He thinks she means Ava. “I’m not talking about you. I’m talking about me,” she snaps. “You know what? Forget it.” She pushes to her feet.
Severin hesitates, fingers drumming a rhythm on the doorframe. “Yes,” he says, after a moment. “But I think if you let the past haunt you, if you can’t accept it, it’s that much harder to make better choices in the future.” He regards her warily, as if expecting her to slap back at him in some way.
But she nods. “That sounds good,” she says, and she means it. But she’s not sure she believes that’s possible. Accepting the past, not being haunted by it. She’s not sure he believes it, either.
“Good night, Doctor,” he says, starting to turn away.
“Ophelia,” she says impulsively. Julius is wrong—she does want to be known, just for more than her family, her history.
Severin pauses. Then he says, “Ethan.”
Her cheeks warm, and for once it’s not from embarrassment or frustration. “Good night, Ethan.”
18
The walls are painted a soothing blue, with a hint of green for warmth. Every detail is carefully considered with patients in mind, down to the heavy knitted blanket tossed casually over the back of the couch for those still dealing with shock, and even the pointed tuck on the recyclable tissues in the gleaming metal cube on the side table. (Makes it easier to remove one when vision is blurred with tears.)
But at dusk, when patient hours are done for the day, that’s when the space truly becomes Ophelia’s.
Like right now. The sun is setting, turning the old skyline into black shadows against an orangey-red backdrop of sun. Old Downtown must have been something before the riots and the fire. The second one.
Ophelia sinks back into her desk chair, stretching her legs, contemplating the spread of her space. Hers. Her pen and notebook rest on the far edge, just waiting for her first patient the next morning. The image of her primary screen hovers in the air in front of her, projected from her QuickQ, flickering a dozen reminders to update files and progress reports.
The iVR is functioning just as it should, giving her a completely realistic version of her office back on Earth.
Ophelia settles in, relaxing. She’s just starting to doze, that lovely, drowsy, relaxed in-between state, when she hears the automated office assistant’s smooth voice.
“Dr. Bray. Rueben Monterra is here.”
Her eyes snap open, and she bolts upright in her chair, hands clawing at the armrests, heart pounding. What?
“AIVA, I missed that. Can you repeat?” Even to her own ears, she sounds wary.
But AIVA remains silent, as she should. That functionality for the iVR is not enabled. No voices, no people, virtual or otherwise. Not to mention, that patient … Ophelia shakes her head.
She waits several seconds, but AIVA does not speak again. Odds were she never spoke at all. It must have been the start of a dream.
No, a nightmare. One that just happened to be set in the same location.
Because it couldn’t be anything more than that. For one thing, Rueben, he always came in the morning. That’s one of the reasons why everything was so—
The room goes dark abruptly, triggering the automatic lights overhead.
That … has never happened before.
Ophelia watches in horror as the windows across the room reveal a deep, black night with pinpricks of stars for bare seconds before transitioning to deep blue and then light gray, precursors to sunrise.
This is not right. No, no, not right. The scene in her office, it’s always dusk. Always.
She pushes her chair away from the desk and stands. It feels sickeningly warm in here, as if waves of heat are radiating from the pale walls. What is happening?
A glitch? If so, this is one hell of a glitch.
She reaches up to pull the iVR band free from the receptors on either side of her temple. But her fingertips find only warm skin. No flex-metal. No trace of the headset at all.
Abandoning caution, Ophelia scrubs her hands over her face, a move that would normally send the device flying.
But there’s still nothing there. No headset. Just the bridge of her nose, the quick brush of eyebrows, the heat of her panicked breath against her palms.
Ophelia snatches her hands away from her face, curling her fingers into her palms. It’s just a dream. It has to be.
Except she’s awake.
Okay, okay, just breathe. It’s a lucid dream. Maybe triggered by the upgrade.
Never mind that this wasn’t in the brochure and that maybe Montrose should leave the exposure therapy to actual therapists.
Ophelia takes a deep breath. She can manage this. All she needs to do is—
“Dr. Bray, Rueben Monterra is here,” AIVA bellows. Her words boom in Ophelia’s head, and she reaches up instinctively to block her ears, a primitive impulse that does no good when the sound is inside.
“Dr. Bray, Rueben Monterra is leaving,” AIVA shrieks, just seconds later.
Ophelia freezes.
It’s exactly … that morning. The morning that Rueben died. Not that AIVA was yelling then. She just kept repeating herself—“He’s here. He’s leaving. He’s here.”—in that flat monotone that expressed no confusion, no concern.
But clearly subtlety is not part of this new program.
Ophelia lunges for the door, moving on instinct, much faster than she did on the day when it really happened. If the headset is going to make her relive one of her worst days, she’s going to do it better than she did the first time.
In the actual moment, she’d assumed a virtual assistant malfunction. What else could it be?
Now, though, Ophelia knows: her patient is pacing on the roof, one level above her office, triggering the virtual assistant’s proximity sensor bubble—five meters in all directions, the grim-faced building engineer later explained—on and off and on again.
If Ophelia can stop Rueben, if she can just reach him before he commits to stepping off into thin air, she can change things. Even if it is just in a dream.
Her fingers curl around the too-warm door handle, and for a moment she’s certain that the lever will not turn, that she will be forced to live through this moment of failing him again.
But the tongue retracts with an audible click—so real, the details—and she rips open the door.
The corridor outside her office in real life is decorated in light shades of gray and purple, with a carpet design that has made her wonder, more than once, if the designer was aware of its end location. There are tiny faces with a variety of expressions, hidden among the abstract flowers and geometric shapes.
She’s already stepping out, her focus on reaching Rueben, before she realizes it’s all wrong. The location. This is not the hallway outside her office. It’s not even the right building.
A dim space station corridor stretches out before her, the lights at fifty percent to conserve power and the alert stripes on the wall flashing red, indicating the general alarm and containment to quarters for all but emergency responders. Not that it would do anyone any good.
Goliath. Home.
Unable to stop her forward momentum, Ophelia stumbles, and her foot—now suddenly bare—lands on the familiar squashed octagonal pattern on the floor. Her toes slip through the wetness of gathering condensation, dampening the grittiness they have already collected during her flight.
No. No, no, no. Her lungs shrivel up on themselves, retreating from their responsibilities. Nausea rides her hard, as if determined to crater her into herself. To turn her inside out.
The hydroponics deck looks exactly as she remembers it. Crowded and cluttered, with the extra jury-rigged humidifiers created from spare parts to pull any excess moisture from the air and rechannel it toward the small and frail food crops. But that also made it a good place to hide—in a game of hide-and-seek, where the stakes were simply losing a game. Not loss of life.
Ophelia clings to the door, which is still somehow impossibly her office door, refusing to look down at herself. The sticky blood and body fluids on her, from where she crawled under the table in the mess hall—they were all once people, people she knew and …
“Little Bird, where are you?” Her father’s singsong chant sounds from somewhere in the distance behind her, and chills roll up her spine like a smooth, cold hand drifting over her vertebrae.
Ophelia gags, hard, and lets go of the door, hands flying up to cover her mouth.
And when she turns to reach for it, the door is gone. She’s on Goliath, with no hint of it ever having been her office.
Enough is enough.
“I’m done now,” she says through clenched teeth. “I’m waking up.” She squeezes her eyes shut, hot tears leaking from beneath her lashes.
All she has to do is open her eyes. That’s it. Just wake up and see the striped cloth of Liana’s mattress above her.
Ophelia counts to ten slowly, ignoring the dripping of water near her and the thud of footsteps in the distance, but growing closer. He’s angry today. Hide. You need to hide!
No. I need to wake up. This isn’t real.
Ophelia draws in air until her lungs ache with it, and then releases it as she opens her eyes, certain that she’ll find herself back in her bunk.
But instead of staring up, she’s staring out across the corridor on the hydroponics deck, directly at the carved-out nook that she once used for shelter, pulling one of the raggedy humidity reclamation units in front of her for cover from her father. Who had murdered twenty-three people already, and then five more when he couldn’t find her. If you counted him as a victim—and no one did—he reached twenty-nine. Just short of a perfect thirty.
Go! Now! Before it’s too late.
“Little Bird, don’t make it any harder than it is! I don’t want to do this. You know I don’t.”
The vibration of his heavy tread reverberates through the metal floor beneath her. That should be impossible. But all of this is impossible. She’s not eleven anymore. And he’s dead. Long dead.
But the desire to run, to hide, is so strong her knees are trembling with it.
“You’re infected,” he calls. “You don’t know, but you are. I have to save you. Please, let me save you!” A sob tears from his throat. “I love you. I—”
Coughing, a harsh-sounding jag, breaks in, interrupting him. The noise is somewhere nearby, closer even than her father somehow.
Ophelia frowns. That’s not what—
The world around Ophelia rotates abruptly and she automatically throws out a hand to push off from any hard surface that she might smack into. Intermittent artificial gravity failures weren’t all that unusual on Goliath back in the day, thanks to worn-out parts and austerity measures that made it difficult to get replacements.
As a child, she used to wish for gravity loss on the station like the children of Earth once wished for inclement weather to keep them out of school. Except, in her case, she and the others would spend the few minutes giggling and playing, shoving off each other and the walls, playing tag in the corridors, until the grav generators were fixed and they were tasked with helping to clean up.
But then her fingers brush over fabric, and her eyes snap open automatically.
Her surroundings spin into a blur that resolves itself into a gray-and-white-striped fabric overhead. She can, once more, feel the gentle press of the mattress against her shoulder blades.
Ophelia’s back. Here and awake.
She sits upright with a gasp, like a diver breaking the surface from unknown depths. She reaches up to wrench the iVR band off her face, only to find it missing.
An immediate burst of panic makes a cold sweat break out all over her skin, until her waking mind finally kicks in.
Right. She’s not wearing an iVR because she pulled them all last night.
No one objected when she retrieved the headsets to run a diagnostic. Just to be sure. It was new tech, after all.
Only Birch gave her side eye about it, but he said nothing.
Pulling her knees to her chest, she wraps her arms around herself, making her body as small as possible, just as she once did to escape her father. Her heart is still chugging hard enough that the beat of it taps against her upraised thigh like a fingertip keeping time.
You’re fine. You’re safe.
Dim light from the corridor spills through the window in the door, so Ophelia can see Kate across from her, gently snoring. In the bunk above, Liana murmurs in her sleep, but nothing indicates alarm or surprise. Probably one of them coughing had woken her enough to pull her out of the dream. She shudders to think how long it might have gone on without that interruption.
Just a nightmare, conjured up all on her own.
Not surprising. Given the stress. Given Birch.
She stares down past her knees, her knuckles turning white with her grip, the clutch of dread stronger yet this morning. She can’t help feeling there’s something more she could—should—be doing about Birch, but she hasn’t been able to come up with a solution that doesn’t seem inadequate. Or frightening.
Keeping an eye on him and trying to convince him that she’s not like her father, that she truly is here to help, is the best she’s got.
With a sigh, Ophelia pushes back her blanket and stands. She doesn’t know what time it is, but checking her wrist-comm is pointless. It’s not like she’s going back to sleep after that.
Maybe not ever again.
She reaches for her shoes at the foot of her bunk and stops.
Her right shoe is missing.
That’s weird. Frowning, she checks under her bed, and then under Kate’s. Nothing.
When Ophelia went to bed the night before, she lined up her fabric shoes at the foot of her bunk, just as she had the previous night.
Now, only the left one is there.
She tiptoes to the corridor and glances up and down. The same leftover junk from the previous team remains in piles. It’s on Severin’s list for cleanup, she knows.
But no sign of her shoe.
She creeps out into the corridor, closing the door to the bunk room gently behind her. The metal floor is cold and gritty against her bare feet, triggering memories of her dream. And that day.
He’s angry. Hide. You need to hide! Now!
The panicked internal voice of the child she once was is loud in her head, until she forcibly pushes it down. She’s not eleven anymore, and she does not need to think of her father.
Ophelia continues toward the central hub, with the thought that her shoe might have somehow ended up in her office. Not that she would have left it there, but perhaps someone is messing with her again. Suresh might have—
She stops short when she enters the central hub.
Her shoe is sitting alone in the shadowy space, a white dot on the open expanse of dark metal floor. Like a rowboat on the ocean, or an escape pod shooting deeper into space instead of toward home.
An uneasy feeling seeps through her as she edges forward to retrieve the shoe. The sensation of being watched raises goose bumps on her skin.
She doesn’t believe in ghosts, not literal ones. Past trauma, sure. People reinflicting damage on themselves as they make fear-based choices to try to avoid more pain, inadvertently causing unhealthy cycles. But in terms of actual spirits reliving their past or torturing the living as vengeance, no. Never.
And yet …
The dimmed overhead lights flicker slightly—the generator struggling to keep up even with reduced demand.
Don’t be ridiculous. No one died here.
Except for all of the Lyrians, buried beneath you, of course. And the ones just over there in the city. Their gaping mouths hanging open, pleading for help that’s never going to come …
Shaking her head at herself, Ophelia heads deeper into the central hub.
Closer up, she realizes the fabric shoe is crushed in at the heel, like someone wedged their foot in quickly, not bothering to put it on correctly, and then accidentally walked out of it. Leaving it where it fell.
Pointing toward the airlock.
She bends down to pick it up, half expecting the fabric to feel icy cold or oddly warm. Instead, it just feels like her shoe.
Of course it does.
“What are you doing?” A voice behind her.
Ophelia jolts, nearly toppling over, and then stands, whipping around to face the speaker.
It’s Kate, shivering in the compression shorts and T-shirt she sleeps in, arms wrapped around herself.
“I was just…” Sometimes the truth is the only option. “Getting my shoe,” Ophelia answers finally, holding up the footwear as evidence.
Kate regards her with a confused frown. “Did you leave it out here earlier?”
“No. I don’t know. I think maybe someone—” Ophelia stops herself before spouting theories that might sound like accusations she cannot prove. “How can I help you?” Clearly, Kate was out here—shivering in her nightclothes—for a purpose.
“I just … I woke up when you left the room, and I thought…” Kate trails off, one hand tugging at the embedded stars in her ear. She seems uncertain, for the first time in Ophelia’s memory. “I wanted to talk to you, alone. About Birch.”
That she was not expecting. “Oh?”
“You treated him last night after the fight. He went straight to his bunk after that, didn’t talk to any of us.” Kate hesitates. “Did he say anything to you?”
Ophelia works to keep her expression impassive, to hide the pulse of interest. “Anything, like what?”
Kate stares down at her feet, scrubbing her toe against the floor. “I’m just worried. He’s never exactly been the cheeriest fellow, you know, but that was extremely out of character for him. He’s never struck anyone before. I think … I think he’s struggling more with what happened to Ava than he’s letting on. And I wanted to know if he spoke to you about it.” She looks up, then, a glint of hardness peeking through her somber mask.
