Bruno WAY: the airfield bomb? i honestly don’t know. I mean, I understand how she feels. She watched her husband die. she thinks she has nothing left to lose.
Asha GRANT: We all have something left to lose
Bruno WAY: I know. that’s why I fight every day. we have to, for hostages here, and the people we love who got away. Jenna and I are going to be together again, I know it.
Asha GRANT: I hope so, Bruno. I really do.
Bruno WAY: r u okay, Ash?
Asha GRANT: i have a dozen dead people incoming, my boss had the **** beat out of him by a BT officer yesterday, and i…yeah.
Asha GRANT: yeah, I’m ok, u?
Bruno WAY: I’m okay. man, this is a long way from high school, huh? Remember when the biggest prob u had was me throwing stuff at the back of ur head in class?
Asha GRANT: Bruno, I have to go.
Bruno WAY: aw c’mon I outgrew throwing **** around when the planet got bombed
Asha GRANT: ha, not that. i need a minute to pull it together before they bring in the corpsicles
Bruno WAY: ok. take care, my friend.
Asha GRANT: u too
<Bruno WAY has left the conversation.>
<Asha GRANT has left the conversation.>
The video starts with a wash of snow that clears to reveal the face of Asha Grant. She’s half-lit by the screen, and the dark shapes behind her sharpen into mops and brooms as the camera of her palmpad finds focus. She’s in a supply closet, switching from an online conversation to a video recording.
Her dark hair’s pulled back in a ponytail, and her light brown skin is washed a greenish shade by the glow of the palmpad she’s using to record. Twin white reflections of her screen show in her green eyes. She’s chewing on her lower lip, fingers drumming against her temple as she considers her opening words.
“Hey, Kady.” Her voice is hoarse with tiredness, and she clears her throat, then continues, softer. “Miss you, cuz. Just need to talk to you for a minute before I go out there and face it all. S’funny, it doesn’t matter at all that these recordings just live here on my palmpad, that I don’t send them anywhere. It still feels like talking to you. I keep these files behind the encryptions you set up for me, and in a way, that feels like you guarding me, keeping me safe. Locking up my secrets for me where nobody can find them.”
She sighs, tipping her head sideways to rest it against a broom handle. “This is ****ed, Kades. There was an explosion at the landing pads, and a bunch of BT troops are dead, and if anyone puts a foot wrong the next day or two, a bunch of us will be dead in retaliation. A bunch more of us, I mean. It has to be someone in the resistance who did it. The coincidence of this and the deaths in the barracks…too much.”
Her lips curve into a tired smile as she reaches out to adjust the palmpad, framing her face more squarely. “My boss, Morton, got the **** beat out of him yesterday. Long story short, he got into another argument with the head of the BeiTech med team and ended up with a broken nose, broken ribs and a fractured eye socket. I told him, Kades, I ****ing told him. I said, BeiTech are the ones with the guns around here. BeiTech giveth, and BeiTech taketh away. Right now they’re letting us use the facilities to treat our people, as long as we help their medical team with theirs. But they can take away our access anytime they like, which is exactly the damn point they’re making locking him up, and still he doesn’t…”
She trails off, scrunching up her face, then letting her expression slacken.
“Let’s just say,” she continues, quieter, “that I’m glad I didn’t let him in on any of the resistance channels. We’ve got enough problems with our loose cannon already. Then again, once BT have enough hermium to jump the Magellan out of here, we’ll be dead anyway, and Morton’s ribs will be the least of his problems.”
She rests her head against the broom handle again, sighs.
“What’s it like to be dead, Kady?”
There’s a tired smile for the question, and a pause as she leans past the palmpad to retrieve a water bottle. “I mean, I assume you’re dead. I heard you made it onto one of the ships, but one of them got blown up right overhead, and the others had that huge BeiTech dreadnought after them, so it seems likely someone blew you to pieces already. But I like to imagine you’re alive, sitting on the couch in my living room, all pink hair and boots on my coffee table, messaging Ezra and *****ing to me about your parents, and…”
Her lips press together so hard they thin, turn pale, and still that doesn’t hide the tremor. Her ponytail falls forward over her shoulder as her head drops, hands coming up to her face for nearly a minute. From outside the closet there’s the muffled noise of a loudspeaker, but she ignores it.
Her eyes are bright when she looks up. “Anyway. I heard you made it onto one of the shuttles. So you’re Schrödinger’s Kady right now. That was this weird old Terran experiment where you put a cat in a box, and since you couldn’t actually know if the cat was dead or alive from that point on, the cat was considered simultaneously both alive and dead…and presumably ****ed off about being in a box. So right now I choose to believe you’re alive. I—”
There’s another noise, this one above her. It’s a softer scrape, and where she ignored the loudspeaker, now she freezes, looking up.
“Katya, what are you doing up there?” she finally whispers.
“Asha, I’m hungry,” a second whisper comes. Younger. Much younger.
Grant digs around in the pocket of her scrubs to produce a snack bar. She reaches toward the ceiling, and when she sits again, her hand is empty.
“I’ll find some more for you tonight, I promise, baby girl,” she whispers. “Keep out of sight, you got it? Quiet as a mouse.”
“The cleverest mouse.”
“And the cleverest mouse never gets caught, does she?”
“She’s way too clever,” is the whispered reply from the invisible child, mumbled around a mouthful of snack bar. Then, with a scrape, she withdraws.
Grant stares at her own reflection in the screen, features slackening into exhaustion now she’s alone. Then she shakes her head, quick and sure, and tugs her scrubs straight as if she’s donning armor.
Reaching forward, she switches off the camera.
This is a transcript of ATLAS-cam footage and video taken from the Kerenza colony hospital server. The quality of the hospital cams is ****. The audio sounds like it was recorded in a toilet. I cannot work under these conditions. Waaaaa.