Searching for Sun Chapter Five

Five

Rule numero two: let him initiate. He invites you, you invite back, he initiates.

Why does he get to initiate?

Because you are terrible at reading people’s emotions.

You like it.

See, you’re terrible. I wasn’t flirting with you.

You were thinking about it.

—Sam (Rundle) Four & Cloey

 Cloey’s JPV

The bar was silvery, refracting light from the mirrored bar wall out over the shadowy green pleather booths and star-streaked windows. Asami didn’t know what she had expected, something like a metal cafeteria, but she began to relax in the dimmed mood lighting. A familiar crowd was hogging the stools around the barkeep.

“Some of us—you look nice, Asami—some of us didn’t make it in one piece,” Ace said, bumping into Asami’s shoulder as she joined them, his heavily liquored breath making her hair flutter, his fingers picking up a strand of her hair that caught on his mouth. He frowned at it in wonderment, looking more wasted than he probably was as he signaled the android behind the bar to refill his glass.

“I just saw Sam.” Asami signaled for a drink as well, wondering if the credit rate had remained the same. “He—”

Ace tapped his forehead. “All on the netfeed darling, Heidi laid it out in medical terms, just a freak chance.”

“They call it a bad freeze. No way to predict it, no way to stop it. Just have to ride it out.” Kelsey dipped a painted red nail into her orange glass.

Asami put her drink down. “It’s happened before?” She felt hot and cold at the idea that Heidi knew the freeze could go wrong and still wanted her to go back in.

“The bad ones don’t go in with us. Heidi has them on special treatments.” Ace smiled sourly. “I wonder what those could be?”

“Sam’s old news, whose brainchild was it that’s numbering us off, changing our names,” Maxi gripped her shot of krupnik so hard against the metallic bar that her fingers turned white. Condensation pooled beneath the drink. Asami tried not to feel irritated at Maxi for changing the subject. “Maxi Four? I sound like a walking department store.”

Ace laughed, “Well hey, I’m halfway to a deck of cards.” He turned to her, “Need another drink Five?”

Asami caught on. Their surnames had been replaced by batch number? She sluggishly placed Ace’s growth group as the others chuckled. He had been in the third group. Ace Three . . . yeah.

Maxi snorted, clearly not amused.

“They don’t want to cause friction between Earth batches and space batches,” Kelsey said into her drink. “You know what the new ones are calling us, right? Freezys, like the freeze separates us from the new batches.”

“Not like we don’t have a name for them,” Ace rotated, wobbling and gripping Asami’s shoulder for balance. “Ugly little ghosts.” He giggled.

Asmai shrugged him off, she didn’t care what new name they had for her kind. They had always been different. Growth Kids, G.P.s. But Asami Five felt more personal. She tried the name in her mind and felt nothing, but maybe that was a residual of the freeze. She had been too slow and stupid to help Sam when she saw something was wrong before the elders had seen.

The bar’s nightlife glow began to feel disorienting since it was mid-afternoon Resolute time. Even though there was no sun or moon to dominate time of day, the long floor-to-ceiling window along the ship's outer hull reflected the life inside the room. The flicker of electric candles on the faux leather green bench seats and the movement of the crew mingling and bunching in small circles that brushed against one another was all echoed by the glass. Outside, there was only the flickering of time and the blur of speed the color black.

Asami rubbed her fingers in the watery rings her shot glass left on the bar, trying to shut out the spinning feeling the room gave her. The light reflected small golden halos onto her hands around the liquor. Hadano had meant little to her as far as names went. It was like an unused middle initial, belonging to no one but herself. It carried with it no heritage, except that of an Earthen tradition of names. Perhaps that was a loss. Yet Five defined her true existence more accurately. She was a part of batch five, her siblings, born of the same generation. She knew no one named Hadano. It was not a gift from her genetic donor as far as she was aware; if it were, she would have felt the loss more.

“The problem,” Ace announced blurrily, “the problem is it makes you feel just like everyone else.” Ace eyed a pale girl that passed behind him, her skin untouched by sunlight, porcelain, yet sickly complexion.

“No, it makes me feel like a device,” Maxi downed her shot. “That is what they will make us, programmed idiots marching to the command of a tablet.”

Asami smiled apologetically at the android behind the counter. His face remained blank, as undisturbed as a dusty bowl. She was tempted to draw a smiley face with her finger, but maybe that was the krupnik working at last.

Outside her door, Asami heard music, the swinging dynamics of an opera. She stood in the hall not wanting to intrude as she heard Cloey’s soprano singing along. She pressed her hands to the door, absorbing the musical hum in the walls.

“I can hear you breathing at my door!” Cloey sang through the wall and the door snapped open.

She had lit a candle. The wick smeared its golden light across the glass jar and formed rings that shot out and up the bare white walls. Cloey always lit candles when she was alone, as if the bright flame brought the empty room to life. Asami blew it out. The top was still see-through when she touched it; the surface resisted her like pudding skin.

 “How was your check-up?” Asami took the one necessary step forward to fall across her bed.

“Hot,” Cloey sighed. “Androids sure have improved while I slept. Except for his awkward, robotic dialogue, I could have sworn he had human skin. You know it’s like, the exterior was perfect, not much going on in his cute little metal head, but hey, I’d get a real drink with him if he’d asked. Not that he did.”

“Sorry,” Asami rolled over, “I’ll upgrade you as soon as I can spare the credits.”

“Who needs an upgrade, I’m top brass,” Cloey hummed, settling down. “Alright, let’s find your boy Sam.”

“Check the critical ward.”

“No, they have him in isolation, I’ll see if we can get a visitor’s pass.”

Asami gripped her visitor’s pass tightly, smiling when a security guard—another man Asami had never seen on the G.P. property before—opened the stairwell door for her as they passed one another. Cloey breezed by, nodding haughtily to the man as if he were a service android.

Once they rounded a corner out of sight, Asami consulted her tablet, reorienting herself. The hospital was close to the center of the ship. She hadn’t done much sneaking since she was a child, and then she’d usually known where she was headed.

Several ghost children nodded as they passed her, streaming out of the holo lab, and Asami winced, watching at least twelve children look her in the face and smile. She reminded herself she hadn’t broken any rules, yet.

A small white arrow on the wall pointed Asami toward the hospital’s main doors. She looked again at her visitor’s pass. It was scheduled for the end of the workweek, but her nurses had never looked that closely at paperwork.

She entered, trying not to look guilty. The hospital was blocked by the wide white receptionist desk, and rows of curtained alcoves flared out behind it. It was almost empty except for the receptionist, an android. Asami sighed inside, androids always checked the numbers.

“Welcome, my name is Holly. How may I be of service?” the android asked. She was tall and plump with pink cheeks, her black hair slicked back into a perfectly round bun.

“I’m not feeling very well,” Asami said, letting her face droop. “Could I maybe lie down here? I just need someplace quiet.”

The android looked her up and down, “Your vitals are a bit high.” She stood from behind the desk and motioned Asami to follow. Cloey dogged Asami’s heels looking around at the sage green walls with dislike.

“Is this color supposed to make me sick?” Cloey asked Asami.

“I picked it out myself,” Holly said, and somehow managed to look stiff drawing back a curtain from a bed with a thin blue blanket folded on top.

“Oh, and it is lovely,” Cloey’s mouth stretched into a wide smile that was almost tearful. “It makes me sick with pleasure, such a soothing color really. Very healthy.”

Holly’s mouth curved down, her eyes unsmiling.

“She wants to kill me,” Cloey whispered loudly at Asami.

Holly took several deep breaths before turning to Asami with a tight smile. “Rest here, a nurse will see you shortly.” Without a glance at Cloey, Holly turned on her heel and whisked the curtain closed around the bed.

Asami glared at Cloey. “You know she wouldn’t have called the nurse if not for you. Now she wants to get rid of us.”

“Asami, these walls want me to throw up.”

“I’m sure the walls have no other purpose than to make you feel sick.” Asami peeked around the curtain.

“No, it’s a real treatment. Like reverse psychology, if the walls can make you throw up, you’ll expel whatever is making you sick.”

“I will never trust another word out of your mouth.” Asami waved Cloey after her, down the curtained rows towards the back of the room where the isolation hall was supposed to be located. Most of the hospital staff were down checking freeze tubes, but there were still security cameras for them to dodge. Asami walked past empty beds with Cloey trailing behind her. The loud thud of the small android’s feet echoed around the room.

“Behind there,” Cloey redirected them towards a two-paneled doorway—heavy, white, reinforced, and sturdy swing doors with two, unavoidable cameras trained down at them. Asami wondered how many minutes they had before security alerted Holly, and she found them.

Pressing her palm flat to the metallic surface of the cool, metal door, and waving her visitor’s pass about casually, incase the guard manning the cameras could be fooled, Asami walked boldly forward praying this wasn’t where all the doctors were congregating. They entered a white hall with red accents indicating more entryways. Noises floated from the back rooms, the sound of metal clanging off metal. Asami peeked through small porthole windows into the rooms.

“In here,” Cloey opened the third door. Sam lay on his back behind a dust-colored clear curtain, a bit of foamy drool on the pillow, his eyes bloodshot and red, the hospital gown showing too much of his thigh.

He looked so much worse than he had that morning, disoriented and vulnerable. She pulled the thin blue blanket over his legs. What had they done to him? He usually had so much energy. Her mind shied from this sickly version, flitting back through the healthy memories of him—his walk solid, his overly large palms, his rough fingers that she could barely interlock between her own, even as a child. Being beside him now reminded her of the moment when she had caught him crying after his crush kissed someone else, his jaw had flexed, his head tilting up, away, as if he could reabsorb the tears by sheer strength.

His leg kicked off the blanket and there were his white legs, the veins, green-toned, somehow more prominent beneath his skin. His arm reached for an invisible door on the ceiling.

Asami touched his hand and his fingers clamped down hard, crushing her palm. That strength gave her hope, even if it did feel like he was going to crack her hand in half.

“Sam,” she crouched down by the bed, her arm pulled half across his chest. “Sam, you have to tell me what’s happening to you. Did they hurt you?”

He stared up at her, his eyes bumpy, as if they had dried out, as if the veins had swollen in them. He looked confused.

He was lost in a fog. Voices came and went—not all of them human, some belonged to freeze, to that other place.

There was something urgent his body told him he should be doing.

“Sam?”

Her voice pulled at him—Think.

His body failed him; his mind failed.

He had something to tell her.

We have something to tell her.

No, no, he didn’t want them to touch her. He had done what they asked. They had no right to want more, to want her. It was part of this place, part of the fog, part of the sadness he could not remember.

She should get away from him.

His thoughts slipped away as the murk thickened around him, hemming him in, pressing him down—suffocating.

She touched him. He could still feel. He wished her hands felt nicer. He wanted something nice right now, but her fingers felt rough against his brittle skin.

She had that stupid, worried look on her face again. The same face she made when he cried over Val. He hadn’t even liked Val that much, had he? He hated himself for that.

Stupid. Aster stupid.

Asami wasn’t who he’d expected to want. He’d liked a lot of girls, all pretty, all surprising, and often in the end . . . selfish. But that’s how it’s supposed to be, isn’t it? But Asami had always been exciting. He didn’t realize how much he wanted exciting. And kind. Those didn’t seem to mix in people often.

He remembered her laughing when they ran across the roof, skidding on ice last winter. Had it only been last winter?

Her blue eyes sparked with white light—he didn’t know where that light came from, how it caught and refracted in the blue—when she laughed. They had dressed all in black and climbed across the long roof of the sky city to sneak into the cafeteria. Cloey had painted their faces with hot pink camo designs.

They came in through a window Sam had left propped open at dinner. Asami had browsed the cabinets for the heavy-duty hand lotion the cooks kept—she’d said Cloey raved about that lotion.

He hadn’t really been looking for anything, just a small thrill. He didn’t remember taking anything, just switching the positions of things around the kitchen. He’d pulled out all the spices and replaced them with potatoes, loads and loads of them lined up in the cabinet. Asami couldn’t stop laughing every time he opened the cupboard doors. He’d put the spices where the utensils were and the utensils in vases across the counter—that had been Asami’s idea.

It seemed like a long time since he’d laughed.

He had something to tell her.

We have something to tell her.

Go away.

No.

Run.

Run, Asami.

“You were warning us,” Asami persisted.

Sam dragged her closer. She went rigid, what was he doing? His face in her hair, his hot, feverish lips on her ear. He was delirious. And then he was talking. She didn’t know if he was speaking out loud; it felt as if his voice was inside her head repeating again and again, and she was falling into the words. No sun, and the moon is wrong, but we can still run. No sun. Run. An image filled her mind.

The world was dark. Sam was walking beneath a bright blue crackled moon. It glowed in the sky obscured quickly by black threads of cloud. He had ice in his hair, ice on his shoes. He phased, young and then grown, his face shimmering childlike and then sharpening through adolescence, but no older. He was looking at her—no—through her, with terror.  A crunch of icy snow sounded.  Holes like fists appeared in the ice beneath Asami’s feet, and something passed through her. She felt it flow inside her as though she was water and it was solid. It was large, physically, and mentally. Its mind grazed over her, and it terrified her. It was like looking over a precipice that fell into the universe. Sam was shrinking from the sound of snapping ice. He seemed so small. She wanted to tell him not to be frightened, but when she looked at him she saw hands appear, matted furry fists reached out and circled his throat. They weren’t hands at all but sticky thick fingers, starfish encircling his neck. She tried to grab hold of those massive arms, but she slipped through them. She was a ghost. Those massive hands were closing.

The world was shaking, she was shaking.

Cloey was shaking her.

“We have to go now!” Cloey looked ready to bite her if she didn’t snap out of the trance.

“Go?” Asami didn’t know how long she’d been standing, hunched over Sam’s body. Her hands were peacefully resting in his. He didn’t look afraid. She didn’t know when he had released her, but the icy sweat on her back felt thick.

“What was that?” she asked, but Sam’s eyes lifted beyond her shoulder.

The curtain tugged aside behind her.

“Miss Five. What are you doing here?” A nurse approached the bed, her white uniform crisped, almost boxy.

Asami didn’t see the nurse’s face, just a vial of lime green liquid with a spitting needle at the tip. The liquid dripped down the metal, oily and thick.

“Miss? Are you not feeling well?”

Sam closed his eyes leaning back, his face spent. She looked at her palms trying to recall the feeling of power that had passed through her, the feeling of understanding time. But it was gone.

They were making her leave. He didn’t want her to go, but she was leaving. Maybe he deserved that. He had always been going on ahead. Always knowing she would follow.

His body was leaving him too. It didn’t answer to him.

The fog rolled in, heavier, greener.

Had he told her everything?

No. He was frightened for her. He had felt it. She wasn’t scared by the things that haunted him. She didn’t understand.

Fog sucked him down, green delirious fog.

Why couldn’t he wake up?

Everything hurt. Everything felt swollen, stiff, and aching.

He felt so, so old.

He just needed to rest.

Liar.

Just for a little while.

Why do you lie to yourself, Sam?

He hated them, and their chorus, but they were the only ones who heard him now.

He was a long way down.

He was crying, wetness rolling from the corners of his eyes down over his ears. Even the voices seemed distant now.

He felt so dizzy.

He couldn’t get enough air.

He just needed to sleep. Really sleep.

Goodbye, Sam.

Goodbye?

He was so far down.

Somehow, he knew—she wouldn’t follow him this time.