Ghost station, p.29
Ghost Station, page 29
“Did you know that I was supposed to be at home the day the tunnel collapsed?” he asks.
The day his sisters died.
“I left them home alone to screw around with some friends at the power station.”
His train of thought is not difficult to follow. “This isn’t your fault,” Ophelia says quickly. “Neither was Ava.”
Ethan frowns, not acknowledging the truth in her words. “It’s not yours, either.”
She lifts her shoulder in a partial denial. “Feels like it.”
He straightens her collar, pulling up the edges under her chin. “That’s always the trouble, isn’t it? When you take on one thing outside of your control, suddenly everything is your fault. Nothing is ever enough.”
A tear spills over and rolls down to her chin. Ophelia swipes at the tear, turning her face away from him. “Sorry,” she says with a half laugh.
“Nothing to be sorry about,” he says. “Some of us are broken enough that we don’t get to be fixed. And maybe we’re better off that way. Not hiding from the damage like everyone else. Just accepting it and figuring out how to work around it. Just like we’re doing. Like you’re doing.” His gaze meets hers and holds it. “It takes guts to face the worst of yourself, the worst of your fears.”
His hands smooth over Ophelia’s shoulders and down her arms, holding her for just a second. “But you need to stop blaming yourself for things you can’t change and ask for help when you need it.”
“You first,” she murmurs.
He smells of coffee and the astringent dry soap from the sonic shower. But it’s comforting, familiar, and she wants to rest her head, just for a moment, in the secure space between his neck and shoulder, to feel the edge of that stubble against her forehead.
The need must show in her expression. Ethan’s throat works with an audible click and he looks away. But only for a second. Then his hand rises from her arm to touch her cheek, wiping away the track of that lone tear. His thumb brushes just beneath her mouth, and her breath catches.
“I…” Ophelia’s voice is breathy and soft. She doesn’t even know what she’s saying or how she’s going to finish.
A distant high-pitched shriek, like a woman or child in pain, pierces the quiet.
She lurches back from Ethan, her heart catapulting in a frantic attempt to escape her chest. Chills skitter across her skin and she wraps her arms around herself.
She looks toward the outer airlock door, as if she’ll be able to see the source of the scream through it. Kate and Suresh are still arguing over Liana and her suit, now working her arms into the sleeves. They give no sign of having heard anything.
Fuck. Was that … Did I … She grips her arms more tightly, like that will keep her from shaking apart.
“I heard it, too,” Ethan says, jerking her attention back to him. He nods, affirming his answer, as if she needs the reassurance, which she does. “It’s okay,” he says. “I heard it.”
Her head bobs in wobbly acknowledgment.
Ethan takes a step back from her, resuming a more professional distance and tone. “It was the wind outside. It sounds a lot like … voices, I’ve noticed.” He’s not looking at her anymore, but at a point somewhere over her right shoulder.
Relief and disappointment course through her so strongly that she feels almost dizzy with the contradiction. It’s for the best. But that knowledge does not drown out the selfish squall of deflected desire. Damn it.
Maybe she is crazy, wanting things she can’t have at the same time that she knows better than to want them.
An exhausted laugh escapes her before she can stop it.
Ethan looks at her questioningly.
“Did you know my grandmother lost her mind at the end of her life?” she says.
He registers the change in tone and subject with confusion. “Miranda Bray?” he asks, with doubt.
“A little irony for you.” Ophelia fumbles with the closures on her suit, making sure they’re closed properly, trying not to notice Ethan following her motions with his gaze. “She despised my father for what she saw as his lack of mental toughness, a lack she was certain I had inherited from him. But then Alzheimer’s got her in the end.” Ophelia has mental illness and disease coming at her on both sides and crosswise in her family.
His brows draw together. “But that’s—”
“Curable? Yep. But that would have meant stepping down from the board to get treatment.” She gives him a hard smile. “Toward the end, I’m pretty sure she had half of the other members convinced that Andrew Busk had managed to resurrect himself from hell. She was so convinced he was a threat. In reality she was talking about events that happened decades ago. She could have saved herself, but she was too stubborn. Too determined to get what she wanted, no matter the cost.” She finishes the final closure with a snap.
His eyebrows arch, his mouth quirking in a thinly disguised smile.
“Yes, I know,” she says dryly. “I’ve spent my whole life trying not to be her, trying not to be anyone in my family, only to realize exactly how much I have of them in me anyway.”
It occurs to her then that if she’d recognized this sooner—and accepted it—she might have been able to be more open, more vulnerable with the people who mattered in her life. Her sister. Julius.
Julius ended up hurting her because she couldn’t be honest with him, and her family used that leverage against her. If he’d known, truly understood her history with her uncle, he would never have done what he did.
Which means Ophelia’s family has power over her only because Ophelia continues to give it to them. By keeping that all-important secret, a secret that’s not even hers to bear.
“We ready?” Suresh calls, out of breath. He, Kate, and Liana are fully suited up, helmets waiting on the rack.
“In a minute,” Ethan responds. Then he turns back to Ophelia. “At least now you can blame it all on alien possession.”
“I have an idea,” he says to Suresh, as he walks away from her.
It takes Ophelia a few seconds to realize that he was joking, that Ethan Severin made a joke. Gallows humor, but humor nonetheless.
Shocking what the prospect of death will do to change a person.
28
Suresh was right; the storm is weaker than before.
Still.
They stay within sight of one another, not that they have a choice. Ethan has linked them all together on another orange cord like the one that used to stretch from the hab to the lander. Turns out it’s from Kate’s mountain climbing equipment, in her personals. She had hoped to try for an ascent here.
“Cool, so we all get lost together,” Suresh muttered, when they’d passed the cord from one to another, threading it through one of the fabric tool loops on the side of their suits.
“Better all of us together than one in every direction,” Kate pointed out. “I can only rescue so many people in time.”
Once, Ophelia would have bristled at the assumption that Kate would be doing the rescuing, or that any of them would require such efforts, but now she’s just glad someone’s thinking about it, putting a contingency plan in place.
Suresh is at the front, followed by Liana, with Kate keeping even with her, though Liana seems to be doing just fine. If anything, she is moving with more certainty and speed than the rest of them, as if she can hear a signal the rest of them can’t.
Ophelia doesn’t think Liana’s seeing anything. At least not with her eyes. What is left of them.
Oh, God, please let this work.
Ophelia is behind Kate, who has the portable sample unit, with Ethan bringing up the tail. She’s grateful to be in the middle. Fighting the wind and the snow and the slightly uphill climb isn’t easy, even in the lighter gravity.
Ahead of them, the towers are sleek black blades sticking out of the ground, growing larger the closer they get.
Looking at them now, she’s not sure how they—or anyone else—thought they belonged here. They’re taller than anything else around, other than the mountains in the distance. The humped remains of the city beneath the snow are significantly lower, smaller.
The Lyrians were considered an intelligent species because they clearly used tools and they were, at least somewhat, spacefaring. But Pinnacle found no old satellites, no space docks, no colonies except that one lone Lyrian on the next planet over in the system. But how much of human technology would be detectable after ten thousand years? Maybe Pinnacle and Montrose assumed that the Lyrians were backward when the opposite was true. The Lyrians might have been more advanced, but because humans don’t view advancement in the same way, they missed it.
The snow doesn’t even seem to stick to the towers above the ground level; they’re like arrows driven into the snowy surface. Ophelia wonders if they’re somehow warmer than the surrounding air. Or if they’re emitting some kind of field that keeps the moisture away.
Another possibility—these things arrived here after the snow started, after the Lyrians were gone.
That seems to stretch the imagination. Humans have found only a dozen or so other planets with signs of former alien civilizations, and this planet has two?
Three, actually, if you count us. Ophelia shakes her head. If Pinnacle and Montrose found something of value here, isn’t it equally likely that some other species might have as well?
Humans have been operating like they have the universe to themselves just because they haven’t found any other living civilizations. Doesn’t mean they aren’t out there.
Our arrogance might well come back to bite us in the ass when or if one of those other sentient species decides they’re done with our bullshit. Ophelia winces, imagining the moment a corporation claims the exact wrong planet as “theirs.”
Ahead of Ophelia, Liana is drawing even with Suresh in her eagerness to reach the towers. Is it her eagerness, though, or the stuff inside her, inside all of them?
Ophelia’s not getting any closer to answers, but working through the possibilities keeps her from fixating on their fate. This extremely unlikely-to-work plan is their best bet, and it seems far more probable that they will all end up like Liana. Best-case scenario.
Ophelia bites her lip. If she doesn’t have control, she doesn’t know what she’ll do. Even her grandmother, when she lost all sense of where she was, even of who she was, resorted to biting and punching anyone who came too close.
And you still don’t know what happened to the rest of the Kellerson pack.
The rest of the surgical instruments, the different-sized scalpels, specifically, are still missing.
Ophelia takes a deep breath. Nothing she can do about that now. She needs to let it go. Just focus on the towers. Maybe this will all work, and the worrying will be for nothing.
The thought cheers her more than she expects it to. Oddly, it feels harder to hang on to her fears at this point, like trying to stop sand from slipping through the cracks between her fingers.
Almost like this is inevitable and they’re finally reaching the end.
The end and we’ll be together, it’ll be so much better and—
“Hey, Doc,” Kate says over the comms, startling her.
“Yes?” Ophelia tries not to sound too out of breath. What was she just thinking about? It’s gone, vanished like a puff of steam in the air. She’s lost not just her train of thought but also the entire station.
“I was thinking about it,” Kate says, a little too casually. “If Pinnacle did what you think, if they covered up what happened here so they could sell the rights, then doesn’t that mean they know how to treat this … whatever this is?”
Ophelia frowns. “What makes you think that?”
“Well, they had to know about it somehow. We only found one suit, one body. Maybe the rest of them made it back.”
Ophelia hesitates. “It’s possible, I suppose.” Equally possible that there are more bodies tucked right next to Delacroix—and now Birch—that they just haven’t found yet. “I don’t think Pinnacle would have sold the rights, though, if they could figure out how to deal with it.” Plus, knowing her family and how they operate, she thinks it’s far more likely that Kate’s earlier speculation about Montrose is probably true for Pinnacle as well. The team reported in, and now the remains of said team are floating in tiny exploded pieces in space somewhere.
“It doesn’t matter, Katey,” Suresh cuts in. “Even if they know, they’re not going to share it with Montrose.”
“Except we have the Pinnacle crown princess with us,” Kate says.
Ophelia gives a choked laugh, something much closer to a strangled noise. “Crown princess?” That would imply that she’s set to take over. Imagining the look on her uncle’s face at that suggestion, the vein in his scalp that would pulse at the idea, is almost enough to make her genuinely laugh. “Like I told you before, my family and I aren’t close.”
“Not close enough to want to save your life?” Kate persists.
“No,” Ophelia says flatly. “If anything, they would be relieved to be rid of me.” She is the proverbial thorn in the side, the loose thread, the piano dangling overhead on a fraying rope.
“Oh.”
Yeah. How does one follow up the blunt nonhyperbolic assessment that someone’s family would prefer them dead?
They trudge onward in silence for several more minutes.
“Slow down, Liana,” Suresh protests. There are dark shadows ahead of Ophelia, but growing clearer as they approach the towers. The towers are huge, providing a dark background against which it’s easier to see, especially when compared to the endless gray of sky and snow.
A high-pitched whine starts in Ophelia’s ears. She turns down the volume on her comms, but it continues. She grimaces, automatically reaching for her ears to rub them, forgetting that her helmet is in the way.
Cells dying in the ear. It happens, more frequently with age. But unlike that experience, this doesn’t fade after a few seconds.
A ping sounds, faint and barely audible. Someone summoning her on a private channel. “Do you feel it?” Ethan asks, after she accepts and turns up the volume.
For a moment, Ophelia’s not sure what he means, too focused on the buzz in her ears, but when she takes stock, she realizes the perpetual tightness in her chest, the grinding dread, is gone.
“It feels better.” His voice doesn’t have that dreamy edge that she noticed from Liana, Suresh, and even Birch before he died. But it’s softer than she’s ever heard from him before.
“It does,” Ophelia says, struggling against the urge to settle into the sensation, like sinking into a warm bath and surrendering to the heat. “But it’s…” She pauses to try to find the right words to describe the feeling. Soothing, but with an edge of tension, a spring coiled beneath a smooth surface, a shark fin in the bathtub. “Too good to be true,” she finishes.
“Like a predator luring in prey,” he says after a moment.
“Yeah,” she says, nodding. “That’s it. Should we go back?”
“I don’t think we can. Not without trying it. We just need to be careful.”
Isn’t that what we’ve been doing? she wants to ask, but that’s not helpful. And she doesn’t have any better suggestions.
When they reach the base of the towers, Ophelia has to immediately discard her previous assessment of the height and girth. Each of them is easily half a city block—or would be, if they were fully upright and rectangular instead of at an angle. It’s as if skyscrapers had suddenly pitched themselves from above, into the ground. Staring up at them from this proximity, she can no longer see the top of them.
They are identical to one another, from what she can see. Smooth, black, mostly opaque, but with a sheen that gives them that crystal-like appearance. No obvious openings, cracks, edges. Each looks to be a singular, whole piece of … something.
She tears her gaze away from the towers—they are strangely enticing, for reasons she doesn’t understand, like staring at the ground over the edge of a tall building and feeling that irrational fear that you might accidentally jump, but also a thrill at the same time.
“Stop, Suresh. That’s close enough,” Ethan says on the comm channel, drawing her attention back to the front of the line.
Suresh and Liana are moving quickly, too quickly, to the nearest tower. Neither of them responds to him.
“Stop!” Ethan charges past Ophelia, pushing the end of the rope into her hands as he passes.
Kate jolts as he rushes by her, seeming to shake herself awake. “Suresh! Stop!” She leaps forward, and Ophelia’s forced to hurry along after her or lose her grip on the cord.
“What?” Suresh rocks to a reluctant halt at Ethan’s hand on his shoulder. Only the tension on the orange cord between Suresh and Liana keeps Liana from proceeding without him. She’s already straining forward, trying to close the final distance. Two, maybe three meters from the base of the tower.
“Didn’t you hear us?” Kate demands.
The tower looms over them like one of those gods of old mythology, waiting to determine their fate. Except …
Home. Safety. Peace.
The impulse pulls at Ophelia, stronger now. That same promise of relief washes over her, enticing her to come closer.
Let go, Little Bird. Come join us. You’ll feel so much better.
The lure is a lot easier to ignore when the voice in her head sounds like her father. A shiver ripples over her skin. This … whatever it is, in her head, it knows her. But it doesn’t seem to comprehend that she might find his voice less than compelling.
“Hear what?” Suresh twists around, looking at them. He blinks slowly, looking drowsy. “What’s wrong?” The words are slushy and slurred.
It’s hard to read body language in suits and helmets, but the way Ethan stiffens, pulling himself upright, tells Ophelia that he’s hearing it the same way.
“We need to keep our distance,” Ethan says. “Come on. Back up.” He takes the cord from Suresh’s hands, pulling the slack into his grasp.
