Searching for Sun Chapter Two

TWO

Rule numero one: eye contact. Keep it connected, smooth, suggestive, but not too suggestive. You’re inviting, you know? Nothing creepy. You see? . . . we will work on that.

—Sam (Rundle) Four

Cloey’s JPV

Sixteen years later

Earth, Resolute, Date: 2332

The familiar scrape of a rock three times on glass in the dark of night. It might have frightened her if it hadn’t been their signal since forever. Cloey’s power cell glowed and faded like a slow heartbeat illuminating and dowsing her room into darkness. She had blinked, poking bits of sleep from her eyes, and turned drowsily towards the noise at her window.

A dark, familiar shape of an upside-down head beckoned her. She grinned, just as she had as a twelve-year-old when she could afford to be out half the night. She raised herself from the bed silently, well practiced in the art of leaving without it creaking or waking Cloey, who was nestled in her own small bed against the opposite wall.

Asami tugged her old sweatshirt back on, scooping it from the floor. Sliding the hinge up with several glances back at the sleeping Cloey, she lifted her arms out the window to be grasped.

His hands were so familiar she didn’t need to see his face. There were calluses on the pads of his fingertips and between his middle and pointer from writing. She slid her hands up his palms to grip his wrists and then forearms, thin but somehow hard and strong—he had to be, to lift her with just his arms while lying on his stomach. Then he stole her out the window.

She laughed as her too long legs banged against the wall, so much for escaping without Cloey knowing—not that she would tattle—scraping as Sam pulled her with stronger, but less practiced, grace up on the roof beside him. She gave a breathless grin.

“We used to be better at this.”

“You used to weigh less.” Sam helped haul her half up, his grip bruising her upper arms a bit. 

She got her feet onto the windowsill, trying breathlessly not to think about what might happen if the wind knocked her off the ledge, and pulled herself the rest of the way onto the roof, the concrete sidewalk a dizzying distance down. She fought the woozy spin, the weakness it lent her muscles as she crawled all the way onto the flat solar panel slats. Sam, upside down, had his feet wedged between two to help keep him from slipping off.

They lay on their backs surrounded by cloud fog. The solar panels were wet beneath them, soaking into Asami's flannel pajamas and making them stick to her skin. The mist frizzed Sam’s hair, where it only seemed to flatten her own.

“You do know getting down will be harder than climbing up here?” Asami lifted her hands above her face, playing with the mists.

“Mmm,” Sam mused in his distracted way.

“What?” Asami narrowed her eyes at him.

“You still wear ugly pajamas,” Sam surprised her, his eyes not on the sky. She felt the wet panel on her cheek like a watery seashell as she turned towards him. His eyes were scrutinizing her.

She scowled at him, hugging the threadbare floppy Willy the Whale sweatshirt around her. “I like my pajamas.”

Sam flicked a smile at her, the kind that always made her brain stutter. “Hard to imagine kissing you in that though, isn’t it?”

Asami gaped.

He chuckled, rolling onto his back once more, one arm cushioning his head. “You’re too easy.”

Asami couldn’t even give it back to him, he looked . . . annoyingly nice. He had thought about the way he would look, in soft black sweatpants and a thin white shirt that stuck to him where it was wet. He always looked good, and he knew it.

“Aren’t you cold?” She prodded his arm just to touch him.

He scoffed but she could see gooseflesh prickling over his exposed skin.

The cold did feel nice against the back of her neck. She ran hot, but she liked the feel of being bundled.

He seemed distant again somehow. The teasing spark gone. His frown made his skin look like carved marble in the darkness, shadows pooling in the creases, his mind floating out of reach. She slid her bare feet on the wet solar panels and studied the sensation as a chill seeped through her layers, tingling numbly over her shoulders.

“Will you do it?” Sam asked, his voice too deep to remind her of the twelve-year-old who used to lay here with her, night after night, pointing out the constellations, and wondering how they would change when they reached the new planet.

“Do what?” Asami glanced at him from the corner of her eye to gauge if he was teasing her again. His face looked sad somehow. Hard and sad.

“Freeze,” Sam breathed the word, mist leaving his lips in a cloud.

“It’s never really been a choice, has it?” Asami asked, lifting a hand to frame the Libra constellation. Even at a distance, the stars glowed back at her making the shape of a home, an entry way with a steeped roof and walls, a triangle with legs.

“If you did have the choice. Would you still go?” Sam asked.

Asami squinted at the stars. She’d never really thought about it as an option.

“Wouldn’t be much here for me if I stayed . . .” She glanced at him again, “No friends,” no you, “no job.” She sighed again. “Besides, I get the feeling Earth isn’t anxious to keep me.”

She remembered all those visits by men in fine linen suits with patent-shined shoes and uniform haircuts. Their gazes that took in all the children but always seemed to linger most on her face with a faint strain. It had gotten worse after her trip to the moon, after the dead man.

That had been the first night Sam had crept into her room, his teeth still cracking on candy rocks that turned his teeth green and purple, like he couldn’t stop eating them. She woke when he inched the door open but pretended to sleep until he rocked the bed almost sitting on her head. She had to tug her long blonde hair out from under his butt and resolved she would chop it off as his knee almost took her eye out. He didn’t seem to notice, shoving her covers out of the way to scoot in next to her, his cold, gritty feet finding the warm underside of her knees in the dark.

“You’re freezing,” Asami had griped, dropping Willy the Whale to wrap her arms around him. He was hot even if his feet were chilled, and the warmth made up for his bony frame.

Cloey’s open stomach monitor blinked a large clock at her. It was only two in the morning. She had been lying awake for the past four hours, trying to forget all the stern faces that had questioned her that long day. Trying to forget the images they had shown her, not just of her man in the cupboard, but of others, killed in less quiet ways. The pictures somehow so much worse than the real thing. It was as though those awful deaths were now immortalized, kept still, unable to fade.

“They questioned you for hoooours,” Sam blew sour sweet candy breath in her face as he plopped his curly head on her pillow. She made room, grudging him her warm spot.

“They questioned you too.”

“Yeah, but all they asked me is why I was in the building, didn’t I think about how I could have been hurt, and did the girl make you go inside?” He wuffled a laugh. “They seemed to really think you were the bad guy. But I bet they were just pitting us against one another, to catch us in a lie, I bet they asked you the same about me.”

“No.” Asami rolled onto her back, blinking dark splotches from the shadowy ceiling. That wasn’t at all what they had asked her. They wanted to know what she was doing on the moon. When had she known the school trip would take place? Had anyone talked to her? Had she known there would be an explosion? Had someone asked her to come here? But that didn’t really surprise her. Adults seemed to expect that she was up to no good. She wasn’t frightened by their questions, though they seemed hard men, old, balding. After the first hour, she had stopped really paying attention, studying instead the men’s balding spots, reminiscent dirt spots in grass, surrounded and flat.

Looking at the shapes the shadows played on the ceiling as Sam began to snore softly into her neck, she fell asleep to the wind of candy blowing her hair across her neck.

Sam had always been the easy sleeper, but now it seemed, there was something keeping him awake.

Sixteen years later, she still felt comforted by his touch, which could make her forget the mist dewing on her face and hair, the coldness of the roof.

Sam leaned closer to her, his curls tickling her throat. She had to hold her breath to keep from shivering at the touch, to keep him close.

“How will the scales balance us?” Sam mused, looking through her hands, his fingers tracing the stars between her palms.

The freeze serum was glacier blue. Hydrogen crystals frosted the glass vials nested in foam-padded medical cases. The liquid flashed up at Asami like a living thing, speaking to her in winks of light. She wanted to touch it, to gather the water on the vials’ exterior between her fingers. To brush its frosty surface clear so that the shimmer inside would deepen into sapphire. Perhaps if she touched it, she would be less nervous. Her body was humming with excitement. It was finally time.

“Pretty, isn’t it?” The nurse held a vial up to the phosphorescent light, his large fingers capable of crushing it like a pill. Asami imagined that the liquid looked back at her, conscious, viscous, and alien.

“Everything poisonous usually is,” she said wryly.

The nurse spared her the briefest of smiles and busied himself with prepping the shot.

Asami glanced away, her fingers twisted together. She thought of moonseed. Shiny blue moon-shaped berries, that’s what she was taking, a berry that would carry her past the moon. Her stomach was empty, a snarling coil of acid that bit at her innards. The nurse said any sort of food traces left inside the stomach or intestine might cause problems after the de-freeze. This would not be the deep, warm sleep of hibernation. But then, she was too anxious to swallow even if she had been allowed to eat.

She had been told she would remember nothing of the freeze sleep. But dreams, she knew, could feel long and terrible. And those were only for a night. This sleep would last years. She couldn’t help but wonder, what if the freeze didn’t work on her? What if she woke up an old woman, her life having passed immobile and unthinking? What if she never woke? She watched her blue vial as the nurse inserted it into an injector. It would be worth it if it worked, if it got her to her new planet with the rest of her life to explore. She didn’t want to waste her youth, isolated from nature on a ship awake for years, but Sam and many others didn’t trust the freeze process either. Some said they were all as good as guinea pigs. It was worth the risk, it had to be.

She shifted on the metal grate in front of her freeze pod, her living embalmment. The freeze chamber was sterile. The floor before the tubes were sliced into grates and benches lined the center aisles. Yellow paint outlined each tube’s territory. The tubes themselves were seven feet tall with an opened glass front. The frosty interior waited to embrace her warm body and hold her until she grew stiff as ice. Even the bodysuit, designed to protect and monitor her life signs, refused to warm against her skin.

She felt someone looking at her—a quick, laughing look. Sam. He hadn’t noticed her when they filed into the freeze chamber. Tall, dark-haired, and somehow, infectiously exciting.

He winked. He had such long eyelashes. He was mouthing something.

Are you ready?

She felt warmed from the inside out, as if she had just swallowed hot tea and it was glowing in her. The memory of last night made him feel closer, like a conspirator. Even separated by ten people, Sam’s nearness made her feel nervous in a different way.

She wasn’t ready at all.

No, she mouthed back down the line.

The nurse cleared his throat and reached for her neck.

“This won’t hurt a bit, just lean your head to the side for me, there you go, just like that.”

For all she knew of chemistry, he could be injecting bubble tea into her veins. But trust was what the G.P. was founded on. Everyone had a place. Everyone had an expertise. She looked up at the ceiling, studying the sweating pipes and felt a prick and then numbness that slowly began to ache.

The nurse had moved on. She looked back down the row, but Sam’s face had lost its merriment. His eyes scrutinizing—watching, she realized, to see how the freeze took her.

No going back now. Asami stepped up into her tube, as much to hide from Sam’s scrutiny as to prepare herself. She closed her eyes, but the darkness reminded her of what awaited her.

The tube was lined with thick foam, and she felt herself slowly sink back. She was being absorbed, she thought, digested into the foam. It molded around her neck and ears, turning into a gel that stuck to her skin. She found that she couldn’t turn her head and wished her last view was not of a shadowy metal wall. Across her face, a breeze, a swirling wind circled around her head. She almost expected to see snowflakes on her pale lashes.

The numb sensation grew from her neck outwards. She shuddered, wondered if her skin was turning blue as the sensation swept along her spine, up and down, threads inserting themselves over her scalp and up her jaw towards her mouth. She felt herself continue to sink; the foam encased both her legs. Two nurses stared at her, poking at their data pads. One lowered the glass over her face. Her stomach was being squeezed. The glass frosted over, feathering in blue and white leaves.

Her heartbeat slowed. She thought that was the oddest part. That her heart could detach from her brain, from her emotions. It should be speeding forward, faster, harder, but it lagged. One beat a second longer each time. Her eyes strained to take in one last sight, but she looked through glass as ice formed in the liquid on her corneas. Snowflakes shaped like clock hands.

Don’t believe everything you see. She thought that would be her last thought. But no one ever remembers the last thing on their minds when sleep comes, because it steals over you like fading light.

In freeze, Asami dreamed.

Heidi’s office door was open. Inside was warm yellow light, filtering through the Fall leaves that rustled in the window. Orange and yellow maple leaves.

“Yes?” Heidi asked.

Asami had always loved Heidi’s creamy completion, the sprinkling of orange and brown freckles on her cheek bones, and the color of autumn in her hair, brown, orange, yellow, red.

“It’s me, Asami.”

Heidi frowned and scrolled through her data pad. “No, I don’t see you here.”

“I don’t have an appointment.” Asami smiled nervously. Why had she come here?

“Who are you?” Heidi asked, not unkindly.

Asami floundered. Heidi had always known her. Heidi had created her. “I wanted to talk.”

“I’m sorry, dear. Maybe I can call someone for you.” Heidi reached for her. Asami noticed the older woman’s skin was still glistening with lotion. She extended her arm to take Heidi’s warm fingers, perhaps Heidi would remember her if they touched. Asami looked down at her own hand, withered like a dried-up leaf. Old women’s arthritic knuckles, with shadowy creases. She recoiled from herself, from the reality—a burst of leaves, a flurry. Panic.

Why so nervous, Little Bird? All things grow.

Dreams of nothing.

Dreams of metal. Her skeleton was iron, she felt it, unbendable. They used to put rods in people, to correct spines, to strengthen broken bones. Sutured together, she was only skin on the outside, underneath she was wires. Her voice box had gone to static, some wire had cracked, the metal beneath the plastic exposed and splintering. Her joints were solid balls and sockets, rotating gears, and washers. In her head the processing board was being dripped on, one drip away from electrical failure.

Those faded.

She had the sense she had forgotten.

Long stretches of black.

In some dreams, hallways opened and closed through her body. Bad smells, ripe, overpowering, she had to spit—

People passed her in a flickering hallway. Their speech was muffled, as if they spoke through water, yet she knew what they were thinking. They knew someone was watching her.

She turned.

Sam was tracing the hair on her neck with his gaze; she felt it, as if his fingers were playing along the nap of her neck. A look that made her feel strange in her own skin, as if her insides were fluttering loose. He stood in an open doorway; lean muscled arms crossed. His tan lips an ironic smirk, his eyes challenging.

She stepped forward. Was this what she wanted?

Of course it is, Little Bird.

Then why was she so uncomfortable?

Growth always is.

She wandered a very long time, exploring one room at a time. One with a table, one with nothing but a chair. She sat in the chair, it was plastic and the legs buckled, or maybe it was wooden after all, solid, well-oiled, and smooth.

Sometimes she dissolved through the maze entirely into open meadows with crunchy grass and damp places to sit. In the rich soil she found bugs, soft worms with red insides, ants that trekked over her mountainous legs, pincher bugs with their scissored ends tripping across dirt and grass blades.

 She was a long way down.

Something soft encircled her head, walked around, and pressed its small feet into her shoulders. Its fur brushed her skin, entered her ears like bristles, slid up her nose like dusty wings. She expelled air through her nose. A moth came out, fluttering wildly. She breathed in, the fur entered her, coating her arteries and organs. She tasted it through sealed lips. It was like fluttering dust. Would love taste like that?

She floated in a vast, quiet cavern. The water hugged her in a delicious, snug, warm way. Tight as if it were a second skin, wax dipped, it slipped in her pores and soaked into her. It covered her eyelids, so they felt heavy. It coated each eyelash, across her mouth, between the corners of her lips, it was glutinous. It slid over her ears, massaging her neck. She was deaf, mute, blind, at peace. She was nothing. There was space to fill.

Expanses of nothing, floating, a rush of stars, mostly nothing.

She was a long way down.

Time swam in this space. It looked upon her with its many eyes, lidless, round, and moist. They were all different colors: black, blue, green, hazel, golden, and all different shades in between. From all its angles and perspectives, it peered at her, and each eye thought something new about her.