Chapter 32

chapter 32

ELLE

"Let me go and get your bag for you," Ceph said, leaving me alone outside the spaceship.

I still couldn't believe I'd been inside of one. It'd looked so different from all the spaceships I'd ever seen, but why shouldn't it be? All of those were made up, of course, and created for things like human hands, human sizes, and gravity.

Whereas the room I'd just been in, down could've been up. There was nothing helpful to orient us inside of it, not even a viewscreen. But come to think of it, why should it have any? Those were just there as narrative devices in TV shows—maybe the aliens didn't have eyes?

Who the fuck knew!

And . . . where were they?

Had they come out of the ship eons ago?

Or were they frozen somewhere safe inside of it, waiting for an intrepid explorer and her trusty kraken?

"Here you go," Ceph said, returning into the beam of my suit's lights, holding the bag out. "I already put all of your things in it— and the rest of the gifts I made you. I realize you do not want them now, but I did not just want to leave them lying on the sea floor."

"Oh," I said. I hadn't realized there were more stages to his courting ritual. "Thanks."

"Shall we go back?" he said, gesturing me forward.

"Please."

I felt his mind in mine, hovering closer than he was, present but quiet for our entire return, until we were close.

"Are you safe in there, Elle?" he asked me.

"I don't really know." I turned toward him. "I mean, they leave me alone, but?—"

Marcus and Donna had to have known that the others died. Hell, they'd put me up in Haberman's old room—he was a little older than me, with long blond hair he wore in a ponytail.

"Will you be able to pretend with them that you do not know the things you now do?"

"I guess I'll have to." It wouldn't do me any good to come at them about it, and I still needed them on my side—I couldn't operate my suit by myself.

When I arrived in the dock room, Donna made a lettuce joke, but didn't try to look in my bag. She helped me out of my suit, and then followed me down the short hall. "Will we be seeing you at dinner tonight?" she asked me, with a smile.

"Elle," Cepharius warned, sensing the words that were going to come out of my mouth.

"Were you not going to tell me that everyone else on this mission has died?"

Donna groaned. "Oh, fuck."

"Did you know?"

She held up both her hands. "They were here for awhile, and then they weren't. We didn't know what happened. They just didn't come back. But that's why we figured Mr. Marlow gave you the kraken. And look, you're still alive, right?" She made a face. "Did you...find them?"

"If she did, she couldn't tell you," Marcus said, appearing behind her in the hall. "It's classified."

"Marcus," Donna complained, as I swallowed.

"No—he's right," I said, looking between the two of them. "And I'll be eating dinner alone tonight. You can leave it in the hall."

"What happened to subterfuge?" Cepharius asked, the second I was alone in my room.

"It's not my strong suit. You might have noticed. Give me a bit," I said, and felt him go away.

I grabbed a change of clothes and went into the bathroom to take my current scrubs and swimsuit off, before making the mistake of looking at the mirror before I hopped into the shower.

I was always surprised by my scars.

I figured I'd have to have them for as long as I'd had breasts, say, since, I was twelve or so, for them to finally feel like they were normal. Now that they were six months old, they'd gone from looking angry to being like brief topographical maps—two horizontal lines across my chest that didn't meet, like my breasts had been turned into imaginary rivers.

The joke Lena always made, after she'd had hers removed, and before we'd accepted that her cancer was far beyond surgical solutions and chemo, was that she was going to send my future kids to college with all the money she saved on bras and fractional amounts of unused soap.

"Fuck," I whispered, and then got into the shower.

I wondered if Donna had a nozzle setting for washing away painful memories.