Unless the cat did it, she thought wryly. That furry creature in her mother’s arms in the old newspaper photo. The notion produced a partial, humorless smile on her face. When pets go bad . . .
The protection of irony wore thin and vanished; she couldn’t keep up that defense. Fear-driven nausea tightened her gut, dizzying her. She had to lean her shoulder against the corridor’s wall to keep from falling.
Something wet seeped through the sleeve of her coat, touching her arm inside. She barely felt it. Something as soft as the touch of another person’s fingertip, even the same temperature, warm as the substance within her own veins. Sarah pushed herself back from the wall, her palm miring in the fluid thick upon it.
She looked at her hand. And saw blood.
Ink-black in the corridor’s partial light; knowing what it was filled in the redness. Her thumb smeared it across her fingertips; spreading them apart revealed the larger, irregular blot filling her palm. For a moment, she wondered if it might be her own blood, if she had cut herself accidentally on the broken plastic she had picked up, the sharp-edged fragment from the smashed overhead lights. She could have wounded herself and not even known it; she would’ve preferred that to any other possibility.
Not wanting to, she turned slowly to one side. Dreading, Sarah forced herself to look at the corridor’s wall, to try to see what was there.
Words, a message. Big red letters, black . . . in the darkness, she could no longer tell the difference. Enough light trickled down the corridor, slid beneath her flinching eyelids and back to the farthest spaces inside her skull-enough to make out the ragged shapes of the letters, the scrawl reaching up higher than her own hand could reach, to the angle of metal above.
This is craziness. Her own words, unspoken voice, to herself. She knew that; everyone did. You found words written in blood, in big smeary letters on the wall, when there were crazy people around. Bad crazy people, the kind that hurt other people. And worse. Sometimes it was the crazy people’s own blood-another memory trip flashed through her head in a millisecond, a buried one that kept coming back into the light where she didn’t want it, a memory that ended with her watching herself, standing just outside in true schizoid fashion, as she had written her name in red exactly like this on the mirror over a green-veined marble bathroom sink with golden faucets, her wrists dripping into pinkly darkening water. That memory ended in blackout, as that other Sarah she’d watched had fallen, hand smearing across the bloodied mirror, as her uncle’s doctors and security guards had been breaking down the door. Crazy. But she still knew that most times, the blood had been inside those other people, the ones who got hurt, cut instead of cutting, the ones who weren’t alive anymore. Crazy .
She stood back from the wall, as far away from it as possible, in the middle of the lightless corridor. Far enough away that she could read what it said, the edge of the distant glow picking out the wet letters, the one word, the name, as a slow line trickled from the bottom curve of the S to the floor.
SARAH
Her own name. As big and crazy as possible; not in a bathroom mirror this time—in this time—but filling a whole wall, each letter standing higher than herself. Written a long time ago, by the measurement of the world outside, up above, where the grey waves rolled beneath the mounting storm clouds. Written just now, in the now that never ended, could never end, inside the Salander 3.
The voice of the ship’s computer whispered inside her head, a tape loop of what it had told her, warned her about, as she had walked away from the light.
Maybe you should go home, little girl. You don’t belong here .
She should have taken the computer’s advice. It had only been trying to protect her, just as it always had. I should’ve listened; too late now, Sarah knew. She had come this far; there could be no leaving until she had gone all the way to the end.
With a shudder arcing down her spine, she turned away from the red-scrawled name on the wall. As she looked down the corridor again, a light appeared, a tiny, flickering thing. Not at the height of her gaze, but lower; she had to shield her eyes for a moment from what might have been a flashlight beam turned straight at her.
The beam shifted away, toward the floor; Sarah lowered her hand. Light shimmered on liquid. The thought came to her that the ship was slowly flooding with water; the sealing mechanisms had broken loose, jarred by nothing but her footsteps, or the hatch to the shaft behind her hadn’t closed properly, letting the Flow’s waters seep in. A dark expanse stretched in front of her, covering the floor; the breath of the ship’s ventilation system stirred a shimmering ripple across the surface.
But it wasn’t seawater; she had known that as well, and couldn’t deny it to herself, when the red trickle from the word on the wall reached the bottom of the wall. The red line, running down from the big smeared S of her name, merged with the dark pool and was the same color, the same substance, black in darkness, red in her knowing.
The glow from the flashlight, or the lantern or whatever it was, reflected from the small lake of blood, faintly illuminating the figure on the other side. She could see the person now.
“Hello,” spoke the child, in a child’s unafraid, curious voice. “Did you just get here?”
Sarah said nothing, then slowly shook her head. “No,” she managed to say.
“Perhaps. I don’t know.”
“I don’t know, either.”
The light wavered across the surface of the blood, sending the child’s shadow fluttering behind her. Sarah’s eyes made their final adjustment to the dark, revealing a little more of the image across from her. A little girl, perhaps ten years old, no more than that; dark hair falling to her thin shoulders, dark, serious eyes. A beautiful child who would grow more beautiful. No, Sarah reminded herself. Would have grown. Someplace where time moved.
“But The girl looked up shyly, through her long black lashes. “You can stay here if you want to. I don’t mind.”
Sarah felt her heart tightening under her breast; a pulse would have shattered it to pieces. Not real, thought Sarah. She closed her eyes, taking the child from her vision for a moment. She’s a ghost. That was the toxic effect of this place. The past didn’t die and go away, as it should. You see things. That didn’t exist, except in memory and the past.
“I’ll stay,” said Sarah. “For a little while, at least.”
The little girl couldn’t keep from smiling. “What’s your name?”
“It’s Sarah. That’s all.”
A puzzled look shaded the girl’s eyes. “Like that?” She glanced over her shoulder to the bloodied wall, then back to the girl. “That’s right.” She nodded. “What’s yours?” The same shy smile appeared. “It’s Rachael,” said the image of the little girl. “My name’s Rachael.”
A Spanish-language double bill was playing at the Million Dollar Theater. The same movies had been playing there forever, or seemingly so; the management never changed the plastic letters on the marquee. They just let the red plastic letters fall off one by one, hitting the rain-soaked sidewalk and lying there like cryptic messages underneath the sizzling broken neon. The hot blue colors ran crazy on the wet street, reflected in every puddle and gutter, upside down and backwards-who could tell?—and legible as the fire-tinged storm clouds rolling across the L.A. night sky.
Christ, thought Rick Deckard. This is a fake. A real good fake, better than the sets and stages and all the other phony rigging at the Outer Hollywood studios. As real-looking as it’d ever gotten there-with accurate rain piped over and drizzling down on walkable streets colored with the same intricate lights and electricity-still, all you’d had to do was look past the camera lenses and the show was over, illusion shattered. This false Los Angeles was a better job—dehydrated deities lived up to their advance billing, as far as he was concerned; no wonder people got into them—but it was still just as much a fake as any other. Perhaps even as much as the real one back on Earth.