“Bullshit.”
Luke recoiled. It was less the word itself than the icy tone Al spoke in.
“I checked Westlake’s room. You weren’t there.”
“You couldn’t have checked, Alice. You’d have seen me sitting there, reading.”
Al raked her unbandaged hand down her face. “Why are you lying to me?”
Something’s wrong here, Luke. Tread carefully.
“I’m not lying, Al. You were working on the generator—”
“I got it working. But I couldn’t move it,” she said. “It’s too heavy. I needed your help. But when I went to find you… poof! You were gone.”
Luke took a step back—he was worried that Al might lash out. Confused anger was kindling inside him now, too; hot coals burned at his temples.
It wants you to fight. Kill each other, maybe.
“I’m sorry, Al. I went to find you. The generator was there, but not you.”
“I went looking for you. But you weren’t… and then… and then…”
“Did you fall asleep, Al?” Luke raised his arms, just an innocent question. “Could that have happened? It was dark in that room and we’ve been up a real long time. Did you just, for a minute… shut your eyes?”
Al bit her lip. Her gaze kept flicking to Westlake’s hatch.
“Al, Dr. Toy is dead.”
Her gaze oriented on him again. “What do you mean?”
What else could I possibly mean? He’s dead, Al. The station killed him.
No, Luke realized, not the station. The station didn’t have the ability to kill, in the same way a pistol didn’t kill a person—only its wielder did. The station was simply the instrument. The Skinner Box, overseen by whatever was administering the shocks.
“After I tried to find you, LB dashed off,” said Luke. “I followed her. She led me to Hugo.”
Al slapped herself, hard. Her eyelids had been sinking closed. She slapped herself again. The sound, a sharp spak!, made Luke wince. She jetted air between her teeth in a series of hard gusts like a weight lifter preparing for a record lift. She nodded as if to say, Okay, I’m good now, and then said: “Tell me what happened to Dr. Toy.”
Luke gratefully let the terrible event pour out of him—sometimes the only way to disburden oneself of the poison is to share it with somebody else.
“That poor bastard,” Al said, her cheeks pink from the slaps. “Jesus Christ.”
Luke told Al what he’d read in Westlake’s journal, too. He felt ludicrous telling her—they were the confessions of a rubber-roomed madman. And yet, listening to him, Al became very quiet. Ambrosia drifted past the huge window as Luke spoke. Shreds piled up like snow against the side of a barn. LB growled at it, a low huff that puffed the loose skin over her upper teeth.
“A hole?” was Al’s first question once Luke finished.
Luke nodded. “That’s what Westlake wrote. Small at first, but growing bigger. He could hear voices from it. Sounds crazy, I know.”
Al’s expression wasn’t disbelieving. It was fearful.
“Luke, listen… I think… yeah, I might’ve fallen asleep. I sort of remember tightening a few wires on the generator, then sitting down to catch my breath. If I nodded off, the thing is—my dream picked up right there. It began in that storage room with my body in the exact same position as it was when I nodded off. And so I got up in my dream and walked down the tunnel to find you, thinking I was still awake. You weren’t there. You’re saying you were—which makes sense if I dreamed it. And then you find me here, trying to get in there.”
She nodded at Westlake’s lab. A shudder racked her frame.
“What I’m saying is,” she went on, “if I sleepwalked to the lab, how did you miss me? I would have stumbled right past Westlake’s room, right?”
Luke nodded. “You would have, yeah. And I would have seen you. Unless…”
“Unless you fell asleep, too. You were sleeping as I walked past.”
That was the only possibility that made sense: Luke had somehow drifted off while reading Westlake’s journal—slipped into a dream-pool without even knowing it. They’d both been asleep when Alice walked past Westlake’s room, right past Luke, neither of them aware of it.
How else could it have happened? Unless the Trieste was reorganizing itself, arranging into new configurations like puzzle pieces, snaking in different directions to ensure they wouldn’t have seen each other?
“We have to get that generator,” Al said. “Get the Challenger powered up and get our asses out of here. And stay awake.”
“What about Clayton?”
“Watch him, Luke. Hawk him. He’s been down here way too long.”
2.
IT WAS A SLOG dragging the generator to the Challenger. An hour? Two? Four? Luke couldn’t say how long. Time drew out like a blade.
The generator wasn’t all that heavy, but it was cumbersome. It had handles on the sides and tiny wheels to help it roll; Luke thought they made it look like the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile, that familiar staple of small-town parades. A light sweat broke out over Luke’s body before they’d even muscled it out of the storage room; it trundled across the grates like a shopping cart with a wonky wheel.
Luke was bathed in sweat by the time they reached the crawl-through chute. Working together, using the handles, Al was sure they would be able to slide it into the crawl-through like a torpedo into the firing tube. But it would require both of them to lift it, meaning the generator would fall out the other end with nobody to catch it.
“The fall could break it,” said Al.
“Do we have anything to cushion it?”
A lightbulb clicked on in Al’s head. “Strip,” she said.
“What?”
“Your overalls,” she said, unzipping her own. “I’ll lay them on the other side as a crash mat.”
Luke removed his overalls. His body looked sickly in the tunnel’s light; the blackness of the sea, falling through a porthole above, cast a circular shadow over his heart. Al’s body was muscular and milky from a life spent underwater. She had a tattoo of a propeller on each hipbone.
“Old superstition,” she said, catching him looking. “Sailors used to get propellers tattooed on their ass, one on each cheek—a good luck charm against drowning. If your ship goes down, they help propel you to shore.”
They stood for a long moment, eyes on each other. Luke felt the warmth radiating off Alice’s body. There was appreciation in their gazes—the appreciation that prevails among soldiers sharing a bunker under heavy fire… but there was a raw hunger, too.
“Right,” she said, breaking eye contact. “Back in a jiff.”
She darted through the crawl-through in her tank top and fitted shorts, arranged their overalls on the other side, and slid back. They hefted the generator and slid it into the chute; it fit easily, with room to spare.
Alice powered it through, pushing it with her feet; Luke followed shortly behind her. The generator nosed out of the crawl-through and hit the floor with a crunch. They inspected it. It looked okay. They put their overalls back on and continued.
The tunnels seemed to be lengthening with a sly stretch and pull. They were narrowing, too, their ceilings lowering. The station’s geometries were shifting subtly. The beat of what sounded like footsteps came irregularly. These were not the mincing footfalls of the waterlogged children—these were plodding, dogged, and they came from somewhere inside.