Free Scardown-Jenny Casey-2 by Elizabeth Bear Page A

the lock plate, and jerk it back as if the damned thing were hot. I keep walking. Gabe's quarters are down the hall and “up” a ladder. He gets a side window and slightly lower “gravity.” Weird how our human desire for a view—the deep-seated urge to see what might be coming to eat you—outweighs the intellectual knowledge that it's cold and deadly on the other side of the
Montreal
's metal skin, and the safest place to be is buried in the center of the ship.
    I knock on his hatchway, but nobody's home. Out of idle irritation as much as anything, I press my right thumb to the lock plate, an opalescent rectangle of black gel polymer that looks like a mood ring and feels like skin. My tongue clicks against the roof of my mouth when I hear the lock disengage. “Well, how about that.” I wonder if Gabe decided to set me up, or if Richard's taking pity on me, and then I undog the hatch, enter the room, and close it behind me.
    Gabe's bunk is made tight and military until I sit down on it and pry my boots off by pressing my toes into the crease above the heel. It smells like him, though: faint musk of his skin, deodorant soap, toothpaste. We've been here almost a week.
    I wonder if, back in Toronto, Elspeth's doing the same damned thing I am.
    Probably not. She's like a machine, all brilliant edges and devious twists. Slicker than a greased snake, Grandpère would say. And twice as sharp as its teeth. I can't really think of her as a rival, even. We're all, as she told me back on Earth, grown-ups here.
    I get through the shakes and the chills wrapped around Gabe's pillow. I'd have to go back to my room for the itty-bitty yellow pills. So harmless. So friendly looking. I've got the self-control to stop myself before I get out the door. If I were alone in my quarters, it might be different.
    Gabe's eyes go wide when he opens the door. “Jenny. How'd you get in here?” And then he sees my bloodless face, the way my metal hand strains the fabric on his blanket. He crosses without another stupid, pointless word and pulls me into an embrace.
    “You set the lock up for me.”
    “Of course I did,” he lies, so I know—
Richard
. And the listening devices, I hope, don't.
    “Hammer?”
    “Obvious?”
    “We did this once,” he reminds me. And we did. It should have been harder, then. I had more pain. A full-blown addiction. A carcass that felt stuffed full of broken glass. He wraps my shoulders in his big gentle arms and I read muscle under a comfortable layer of fluff. A bear, I used to call him, and he gets more bearlike with every year gone by.
    I was a hell of a lot younger the last time.
    “Mon ange,” I say into his neck. “It hurts.”
    “We're going home in a couple of days,” he answers. “Hang on, Jenny. Hang on.”
    He doesn't say what I know: that even on Earth, there will be the drugs, the tests, the training. And it's kids like Leah and Patricia Valens I'm going to be—I hope—teaching things that will get them out of this meat-grinder alive.
    The drug is out of my system. I can tell, because it's taken with it every chemical trace of calm.
     
    7:00 AM

Tuesday 7 November, 2062

Office of the Chief Medical Examiner

Hartford, Connecticut
    The sound of running water covered the noise of her footsteps on channeled steel as Dr. Kuai Hua peeled off a double layer of red-smeared vinyl gloves. She dropped them into a biohazard bag beside a stainless-steel sink, then discarded her gown, mask, and the rest of her paper wrapping before hand washing efficiently. She turned the water off with an elbow against the flat handle of the fixture. An absent expression pursing her lips, she exited to the white-tiled prep room, took a palmful of the peppermint-scented lotion she kept there, and smoothed it liberally over her hands, working it in along the cuticles of her clipped, spotless nails.
    The door opened behind her. “Looking pensive, Dr. Hua.”
    “Good morning, Sally,” she answered, still facing the sink.