“How do you feel, Luke?” Clayton asked with mock concern.
“This from the guy who’s walking around in his sleep, sending up pleading transmissions.” Luke’s voice rose to a reedy falsetto. “Oh brother, oh brother, where art thou my brother—I neeeeeeeds you!”
Clayton’s jaw tightened. “I did no such thing. I’d as soon have called for a janitor.”
Luke turned to Al, refusing to be baited into a fight. “I told Clay we should head up. Just until we can get a grip on what’s happening down here.”
“I can understand how this may come as a shock,” said Clayton, recovering his poise. “The things I’ve discovered are daunting. Frightening, even. But imagine living in the shadow of a dormant volcano. It’s scary at first… but you get used to it. People do it all the time. They exist under perpetual threat. And there’s so much work to be done here. Up there”—he pointed toward the surface—“people are suffering. Dying. They need us to stay here. To be strong and persevere. Surely you understand that?”
Oh please, you sententious bastard, Luke thought. You only care about yourself and your research, same as it ever was.
“What about the animals?” Clay continued. It was the first time he’d referred to them as anything but specimens. “If we go, we’ll have to leave them. And Dr. Toy, as well, who could destroy the station in our absence. Can we really take that risk?”
“What’s to stop him from destroying it right now?” Luke shot back.
“Maybe us just being here?” Al said reasonably. “There’s nothing in Toy’s quarters that he could use to wreck this place—but if we leave, giving him full run…”
Luke was dismayed to see that Al was taking his brother’s side on this.
“So we lock the hatches,” Luke said. “Can’t we do that? Can’t we—”
“Look, I told you I’m not leaving,” Clay said simply. “There’s too much to do, and too little time left. As I keep telling you—do whatever you want.”
A sense of despair had settled under Luke’s skin, itching like pink fiberglass insulation. Al held the deciding vote.
“Fuck it,” Al said after a spell. “Dr. Nelson, no disrespect, but Luke’s got a point. I think things may be on the verge of a catastrophic fuckup.”
Clayton impassively regarded Al. “I’ve spoken my piece.”
“Fuck it,” Al said again. “Luke, let’s go talk to topside operations. Dr. Nelson, I want you to stay where I can find you.”
“I’ll be in my lab,” Clayton said.
He turned his back to them. He was singing another nursery rhyme as he retreated into his lab.
“Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home; your house is on fire, your children all gone…”
8.
LUKE AND LB FOLLOWED AL to the storage area. They shimmied through the crawl-through chute. It was easier this time. Al caught LB as she rocketed awkwardly out of the chute; she licked her face appreciatively. Luke came last. They continued on to reach the storage tunnel hatch. Al spun the wheel; there was a steady hiss as the pressure abated.
“Hold the door for a sec, Luke. I don’t want us getting locked in again.”
She hunted around until she found a used air-purification canister. “Okay, come on through.”
LB hesitated—she’d been locked in the tunnel for Lord knows how long—before resignedly slipping through the doorway. Al wedged the canister in and let the hatch close under its own weight; it crimped the canister slightly but left the door propped open a few inches.
“That’ll hold,” she said. “Unless someone kicks it loose.”
“Who would do that?”
Al tilted her head—an analytical insurance adjuster’s gaze.
“I spent a lot of time with Westlake,” she said. “We trained together. Eight, ten hours a day. Most eggheads have got their head in the clouds or up their own clueless asses. Westlake was different. On the level. Even keel.”
Al headed down the storage tunnel. Luke followed. The cold locked around his limbs almost immediately, as if it had been waiting to embrace him again.
“Point being,” she continued, “Westlake and I got on. Your brother and Dr. Toy were all business. Westlake was different—normal. And he was still pretty normal down here, at least at first. In fact he seemed better than normal.”
“Better how?”
Al shrugged as if to say it was hard to explain. But she tried.
“Training was intense, right? It ground us all down—all but your brother, who seems sorta cyborgish. I’d expected Westlake’s furlough down here to wear on him. Doctor Toy really struggled in training; he almost didn’t make it down, in fact. We nearly replaced him. And like I said before, you can’t do mental push-ups to prepare yourself—you’ve either got that tolerance or you don’t. So we were surprised to see that when Westlake first got down, he actually seemed brighter, stronger, healthier. I couldn’t pinpoint it, but it was a change. Maybe not a good one, either.”
“What do you mean?”
They’d made it around the gooseneck, forging down the tunnel toward the Challenger’s entry hatch.
“I mean, just different. Something off in his eyes. His movements were weird, jerky, on the monitors. That is to say, before all the screens went blank. When we were topside, Westlake had a sense of what the ambrosia might be able to do… but he was skeptical. Once he got down, that changed. At his psych appointments—which were delivered remotely from a special room down here, every two days at the outset—it was all he’d talk about. The miracle agent, he called it. A kind of mania invaded him. And then he went AWOL. Stopped attending his psych appointments. Stopped being visible on the monitors. He just… poof. Vanished.”
Al shook her head. “And then you tell me Westlake was raving about holes in the station and other assorted bat-shittery. I’m not judging—I think I get it now. Luke, I need to ask: when you fell asleep down here, did you dream?”
Luke’s footsteps faltered. The phantom children raced overhead, their own footsteps keeping pace with the rapid beat of his heart.
“Did you?” she repeated.
“Yes,” he said finally. “A nightmare. The worst I can ever recall.”
Al nodded with a grim look of commiseration and of understanding. In the gloom, her teeth were gray: a row of tiny tombstones.
Luke told her about his dream. He trusted Al, and was emboldened by her forthrightness. He told her about Zach, the ambrosia, the eyes. He didn’t tell her what happened to his son that day in the park (which had been the reason the dream hadn’t just scared him—it hurt him, too), but it felt good, necessary, to disburden himself.
He kept the sleepwalking episode to himself. He needed her to trust him. She needed to trust that he had things on lockdown… because he did have things on lockdown, pretty much at least, and was going to keep it that way.
“I managed to catch a few minutes of shut-eye,” said Al. “I had a nightmare, same as you.”
She leaned against the tunnel. The wall seemed to belly inward around her body—opening up like a toothless mouth.
Stand up, quickly, Luke wanted to say. Get away from it.
But that would sound crazy. Like he didn’t have things on lockdown.
“I spent three years aboard the USS Kingfisher,” Al said. “A nuclear attack sub. We were on tactical maneuvers. Routine stuff. I was junior lieutenant, tactical armaments. We suffered an electrical malfunction. We lost power. Total blackness at three hundred feet underwater. Then we were hit with a power surge. One of the two main engines blew out. Exploded, more or less.”