In the kitchen, I could almost smell the pancakes. In the captain’s suite, I’d been electrified by the feeling of hands gliding over me. Then in the medlab, inescapable sadness filtered through me. I wanted to cry, and though I swiped at the tears and stormed out to the lift, I’d gone down rather than up.
The doors opened to a world so close to my own, that I actually had to force myself to step through them and onto the path. The rocky escarpment, the green growth, and the rhythmic flow of the ocean—it was my facility in New Zealand. Though it had been dark when I made my way along the rise to the path taking me to the water, the sky told me I was on the island chain I’d grown up on. The scent of orchids flowed amidst the salty air.
Salty air.
Where was the garden? The perfect Eden? Even as the thought cropped up, I shuddered. Cold fear replaced sadness and wonder. I almost ran to the lift and rushed back to my quarters, but I made myself stay.
I refused to run from whatever strange hell I found myself in. It was all correct, and yet utterly wrong in the same breath.
“Hang on for us.” Oz. My kind, compassionate physician, so lost in a world that put a price on survival. It was as though he stood right at the edge of my consciousness, his hand reaching out to me—but my fingers passed through the phantom he represented.
The water was cold against my ankles, but I pressed out into the darkness, letting it wash over me. The warm air. The brilliant expanse of starry sky.
Where the hell was I?
“Believe it’s possible.” Andreas. I wanted to slap him. Pivoting in the water, I stared at the shore. He kept trying to piss me off. Why? Andreas…Andreas Kenton. I’d read his file, but it was the image of a stranger, and yet, so intimately familiar. I couldn’t reconcile these two disparate sides.
“But you have to,” I told myself, speaking to the dark and the tide as the water rushed in to soak my pant legs. “You have to make sense of all of this. If we’re to save anyone, we must begin with ourselves.”
Even uttering the sentiment hadn’t made it more real than what I’d already tried. I stood in the water until the sun was a promise on the horizon. Frozen nearly to my core, I’d stumbled away from the beach. It still looked like New Zealand, and if I looked up, I’d see the facility—but I didn’t dare.
Because what if I looked up to the cliffs and discovered that it wasn’t there? Irrational perhaps, but hope was the only way I could survive. Truth echoed in the sentiment, someone I loved and trusted had impressed it upon me. But who, dammit, who?
At the lift door, I flattened my hand against the metal. Another inconsistency in a treasure trove overflowing with gilded lies and burnished half-truths. It was like being in a dream, and knowing it was a dream…yet unable to stop the dream. I would be propelled to whatever insane destination my mind had conjured for me.
I hated these types of dreams. I’d never been good at just going with the flow.
Once back on the living quarters level, I trudged to my rooms. The computer warned me the first emergence approached. Waving a hand at the monitor, I silenced the alert. I was all too aware of the impending awakenings, and they terrified me.
Still, I would shower and change, and dress for the occasion. Having a purpose would invigorate me.
Right? I would need only apply the logic I applied to all my projects, and we would…what?
Hope was irrational. Logic attempted to apply order to an otherwise unruly world.
Inside my room, I stared at the brightly colored blanket across the back of my sofa, then let my gaze travel from it to the image frozen on the screen. Four men. All currently in lifepods awaiting their emergence.
My team.
Who were they?
“We’re forever.” Dirk’s voice whispered to me, a memory? A wishful thought? An oxygen deprived hallucination?
Stop it.
“Believe that.” Dirk. The army jerk. The one who always told me the truth. Pain lanced through my skull, but I pushed past the needles digging into my brain. I wouldn’t be deterred. Not by anything.
I needed answers. Squeezing my eyes shut, I pictured a small wooden piano my mother had kept. Whenever a puzzle refused to be solved, she’d sit at the piano and play the loveliest, and sometimes the saddest, of songs. She didn’t read the music, she just closed her eyes and played.
Standing in the middle of my remorselessly white room, softened only by the kiss of color Hatch left for me, I began to move my fingers against the air. The music came from the very depths of memory, half-formed and mostly forgotten, yet the emotion remained.
One note at a time, I weaved together a sense of order amongst the chaos. Still playing, I began pirouetting in slow circles. A flash of laughter, and my mother’s eyes opening to see me dance. The smile flowed to my face. I loved it when my mother played, even the slowest of dirges which left me wanting to weep.
Music, my mother once told me, was the language of the soul. It didn’t need words. The dark, and often times lonely, road of science could be hard, cold, and cruel. When it was at its bleakest, she whispered in my mind, that was when you needed to play, to hear the music you might otherwise ignore.
Slowly, the moment faded and my present rushed back in, a suffocating blanket of surreality. Shower. Dress. Wake the men.
Get answers.
List decided, I wasted no more time on thoughts of ghosts or lost memories, at least until I was done, and inspected my appearance in the mirror. I’d chosen a vibrant blue sarong, which left my shoulders bare. I’d taken time to dry my hair and brush it until fell straight and smooth. The cosmetics, I ignored. I should have worn scrubs.
They were hardly going to be impressed by my choice of clothing, if they were even capable of noticing it.
So why had I done this?
Because I miss them… The thought danced through my mind like a butterfly fluttering through a garden, both ephemeral and permanent. Dizziness swarmed through me, but no—it was as though I had one foot planted here, and one somewhere else. I don’t belong here. The second thought had greater purchase than the first.
I would never have agreed to such a long-distance project, not unless it was absolutely necessary. Logic dictated the only reason I was here was because I needed to be, so why did it feel so wrong?
Because I miss them…
Stop it. A pain radiated from the center of my chest, like a vicious heartburn eating its acidic way through my middle. I pressed a hand over my breast and pushed, as if I could make it stop.
Panting breaths and letting everything run amuck was the surest way to a panic attack. I didn’t have panic attacks. I refused to begin now, here—wherever the hell here was. I had a job to do, and I’d damn well do it.
Turning my back on the image of the lost woman staring back at me with a glassy expression in her wide eyes, I strode from the room. I was a scientist. A trained researcher. A developer, and a creator. I lived away from others by choice. This was just another choice I’d made.
The words sustained me all the way to the first suite and the computer’s annoying alert. “Warning. Oz Morgan emerging in one minute.”
How bad could it be?
Hours later…
We sat in the kitchen area, food plates in front of each person, though they didn’t seem all that interested in eating. Not that I could blame them. I hadn’t cared much for it the night before. Adaptation, however, required we all get some sustenance in us, and they’d begun appearing one after the other when I’d first begun cooking. I could have prepared food in my suite, but they’d all stumbled from their pods in various states of awareness and illness—and I couldn’t shake the thought that they needed me.