Free The Void by Brett J. Talley

looked at him and he knew enough about secrets to know what she was thinking.
    “I read your file,” he said. “Maybe I shouldn't have, but Riley's a long way away. I like to know who our passengers are. Was surprised to learn you're a warp engineer though. Can't say I saw that coming.”
    “You read my file?” she repeated. Rebecca had always been a private person and while she liked Aidan, she felt violated.
    “It's not a crime,” he said. “If you are a passenger on a transport, your life is an open book. I'm the navigator on this ship. I just wanted to see whom I was dealing with is all. Didn't mean any offense.”
    Of course he didn't, she thought. She wasn't really mad at him anyway. She was mad at herself, at her one great weakness. The one that made her question who she really was.
    “Look, I know you failed the test. Plenty of people have. I've worked with a lot of good guys who failed it too. I've never had a problem with any of them. Most people out here have never even taken it. You'll be fine. It's just a bunch of government bullshit.”
    “But what if it's not?” she said. “I mean, the way everybody talks about the dreams . . . what if it's not?”
    “Well . . .”
    Aidan didn't really know what to say about that. If it was true, if she really was weak, there was a good chance she was about to lose it out here, and she would never get it back. Nobody liked to talk about the Kirkbride Institute. Nobody in the trade, nobody in the void, nobody at all, really.
    Most people had probably never even heard of its existence, though they must have known of the need for it. It was the place people who had lost their minds from the dreams went, assuming they didn't die on the trip. It was virtually a myth, its location hidden, its population a secret. But they were there.
    Aidan knew only because he had seen a classified document once on a run he made ferrying some government guys between Earth and Mars. And it had mentioned Kirkbride, a place navigators in the guild only whispered about. There was no hope for the people there. Dr. Ridley and his psyche meds couldn't reach them. Their minds were gone forever.
    Some of them claimed to be prophets. To know things that other men did not. To see truths that other men could only guess at. To see the future even, all the way to the end of time itself. And then there were the screamers. Aidan had been on a ship once with one of those. It had been the kid's first time. He had made the initial jump just fine. But when the ship warped back into solar space, Aidan awoke to the man's terrified shrieks.
    The boy had never stopped screaming, the rest of the trip. Even though they had isolated him, they could still hear his desperate cries through the walls, and he was still screaming when they turned him over to medical. The screaming had not ceased long enough for him to tell them what he saw. The consensus seemed to be that he was living the dream over and over again. Seeing it, even in his waking life. Whatever images of horror that had driven him mad, they never left his sight.
    “You'll be fine,” Aidan said finally. “You'll be fine.”
    “And how are you gonna be?” Rebecca asked. She lowered her head toward him, conspiratorially. “You're not the only one that can read a file.”
    “I'll . . . I'll be fine,” he said, after a moment's hesitation.
    “You know it wasn't your fault, just because you made it back,” she said. “There's no way it was your fault.”
    “Yeah, I know. I mean, I know that on some level,” he said. “But I can't remember it. And as long as I can't remember it, I can't help but have doubts about what exactly happened that day.”
    “Well,” she said cheerfully, “at least we've got each other. Two screwed-up peas in a pod.”
    “Yeah.” Aidan laughed. “At least we do.”
    The ship rumbled beneath them, and the screen showed only the blankness of space and the stars beyond. But had they been watching it more closely instead