FREE SAMPLE (Ch.1)

It was the fourth time she’d died this week.

She’d died every night since Sunday. Only Wednesday night had spared her, but that was due to my self-imposed insomnia and not any luck on her part.

Now it was Thursday night—or, more accurately, the inhumanely early hours of Friday morning—and I knew as soon my head hit the pillow that she would not live to see daylight.

There was no variety to the murders, which irked me. In another life, my subconscious had been more creative in inflicting punishment, but apparently I was losing my touch.

Every night was the same. It started with the smell—the burning stench of rusted metal that seared my nostrils. Then there was the clanging of decapitated machines, the wailing of unhelpful sirens, and the swaying of the broken platform as it bucked beneath my feet.

And then, before I could even orient myself and regain control of my muscles, she fell.

Sometimes she screamed. Sometimes she was silent. Sometimes, when I was feeling particularly self-loathing, she called my name. But each time, she hung eerily mid-air, her descent slowing until I fooled myself into thinking I could reach her in time.

But I never did. Every time the world restarted, and every time she dropped like a rock. And in this reality, there was nothing to break her fall.

Tonight, I didn’t even try to save her. I walked to the edge of the platform and gripped the railing, ignoring the burn of Red Rain on my fingers. I watched her fall, her dark hair rippling in slow-motion like she was floating in a river, and willed her to die. I wished she would hit the ground so I could wake up.

And then, suddenly, I did.

I shattered into reality. A shrill ring pierced my ears; I glanced at the tablet on my bedside table and realized someone was calling me. Normally I would have cursed the intrusion, but this time, it could not have been more opportune. I took a deep breath, relishing the darkness of the room, and toyed with the idea of being grateful.

Then I noticed the caller ID and remembered I had absolutely nothing to be thankful for.

I sat up and grabbed the device. She’d only called me once since she left. And while there had been a very valid reason for that call, she should have been calling me every day. I was the only responsible adult in her life, despite what her father might say, and she needed me.

But she was too stubborn to ask for help, and I was too stubborn to point that out, so we’d barely talked since she left. Which meant, if she was motivated enough to call me, it could only be bad news.

My nightmares weren’t over. They were about to become reality.

I rubbed my temples even as I accepted the call. I didn’t have the emotional energy for any of the pedestrian chatter she might use to try and frame her confession, so as soon as the line picked up, I declared:

“Who died?”

My prophetic accuracy stunned her long enough for me to flip on a light and stumble over to the coffee maker I had on my dresser for just such emergencies.

“Uh… what?” she finally managed.

I sighed and tossed the tablet on the dresser. One of these days she would realize that I knew a lot more than she gave me credit for, but today was not that day. “It’s the middle of the night over here.” I walked her through it as I fumbled with the safety seal on a coffee pod. “So either you forgot to look up interplanetary time zones, or someone’s dead.”

She was silent, and I had my answer. It would be nice to be wrong once in a while.

“Well,” she hesitated, as she always did when she was guilty, “no one’s dead yet…”

Oh, how my sanity swings on that operative word. I jammed the pod in the machine and punched the button. If only the relative force would make the relief brew faster.

“…that’s why I need your help.”

My inner tirade derailed as her words flooded me with an emotion that was entirely inappropriate for the situation.

By way of invitation, I softened my tone. “What happened?”

She didn’t take me up on my offer. She went silent again.

Before I could repeat myself using more affirmative language, another voice inserted themselves into the conversation. “I can explain if you want.”

“Who’s that?” I snapped. My muscles immediately went on the defensive, although I think it had more to do with the fact that the voice was distinctly young and male than with the fact that I couldn’t place him.

“Stanyard,” she answered, and then rudely made me figure it out for myself.

Memories of the dark-haired bundle of angsty hormones came into focus, and I became even more confused. “The kid?” I coughed. She could do so much better.

“Wow, specific,” he muttered.

I was more than happy to remind him of his claim to fame. “The one who abandoned you in an alley—”

“Yes, yes,” she cut me off in a fluster, which confirmed my suspicions. “Ephesus is here too.”

Logically, I knew that her brother being with her was an improvement of her situation, if only a marginal one. But the fact that they’d miraculously reunited overnight—when a mere twelve hours ago she’d had no idea where he was—told me that she had not been laying low like she promised.

Suddenly, there were a lot of words I wanted to say. But I opted not to waste my breath on them and instead just swore.

Ephesus returned the sentiment from somewhere in the background.

I abandoned my coffee and strode back to the desk. “Well, this ought to be an excellent bedtime story.” I flicked my monitor on and pulled up a note file. “Start from the beginning, Andromeda.”

She hesitated again. I contemplated threatening her with her real name but decided I’d better not forfeit my ace so early in the conversation. Instead, I settled on, “And if you were thinking of holding anything back, let me remind you that this app encrypts calls.”

She mumbled her defeat. “You said it wasn’t bulletproof…”

“It’s a risk I’m willing to take,” I announced, and hoped she would appreciate the sacrifice. “Start talking.”

She finally obeyed me, and that was where the warm fuzzy feeling ended.

Her story was a nightmare, worse than any I’d been concocting lately. She’d blown her cover; her dad had been cryogenically frozen; and my former assistant had nearly murdered her. It was a trainwreck of one ghastly mistake after another, and unfortunately for all involved, she could not be blamed for all of it.

I was used to a baseline of idiocy from her. I knew how to do damage control on her stupidity. But I hadn’t planned on being slapped in the face with my own.

“Carnegie must have picked him up outside of Andes’s,” she confessed, and waited for me to put the nail in the coffin.

I did so without thinking. “Oh, I’m quite sure that’s exactly what happened,” I snapped. I hadn’t intended to vocalize my frustration, but it was preferrable to the physical demonstration I was considering.

As usual, she pitifully assumed all anger in the room was directed at her. “I know, I’m sorry, I should have—”

There were a million ways to autofill that sentence, and I regrettably chose the least helpful option. “You should have waited to contact Andes until you had your father with you, like I told you to!”

Would that have averted disaster? If anything, Carnegie might have just gotten two birds with one stone, and I would have handed them to him. I was the one who referred Philadelphia to Andes. If I’d remembered my manners, I would have sent her with gift wrap and a bow.

She continued to blunder through her tale, but I mentally minimized the window and devoted my processing power to berating myself. Of course Carnegie knew about Andes. He had been there the last time I had contracted Andes’s services, hovering at my elbow like the wraith that he was. I hadn’t thought a thing of it because he had been my assistant, a fixture of the room more than a human being.

I got up to retrieve my coffee, not that I expected it to do any good. It would take something much stronger than caffeine to dull my mood at this point. As usual, my dreams had been prophetic in more ways than one. I was too late to prevent her from crashing.

And, yet again, it was my fault that she fell.

I returned to the desk only to realize that she’d finished her story and was waiting for a response. The window to apologize had passed five minutes ago, so I decided not to make it awkward and continued with damage control. I plied her for the morbid details about her father and helped her plan her next move. I plastered on some sarcasm in an attempt to make my advice easier to swallow, but slapping lipstick on a pig would have been a more profitable endeavor. Neither of us was in any way comforted by my emotional disinterest. I was grateful when she gave me an out to end the call.

I shoved my chair back, grabbed my now-cold coffee, and strode from the room. It was well past midnight, and the base was in power-saving mode. Keypads and fluorescents that were normally blinding had gone dark, and the lonely Martian sky above the glass dome lent little light. Only the low security lamps near the floor traced out the borders of the hallway.

I could have used my security clearance to override the lights, but I didn’t need to. Unlike Phil, I could get to Wing 74 without a map.

The base grew increasingly quieter, the hum of generators and monitors fading like the breath leaving a dying man, as I neared the abandoned wing. I stepped over a roll of insulation and gingerly picked my way through the maze of construction paraphernalia. I would have preferred to demolish the entire wing rather than remodel, and it probably would have been the cheaper solution. But there was one room that I had been unable to condemn for eight years, and I was under no delusion that I’d find the courage to do so now.

I tapped the keypad to wake it up and swiped my hand over it. It was one of the few areas on base that only I could get into; even Phil didn’t have access to this room yet. I stepped in, let the doors shut behind me, and waited for the silence to return.

There were no security lights or windows in this room, making it as dark as a grave—which in a way, it was. I let the utter blackness envelope me, appreciating the cold air caused by the cavernous space. Even my heavy breathing echoed oddly around the near-empty dome.

I waited until the familiarity of the space calmed my nerves, then let my mind replay the conversation with Phil. After a few more sips of coffee, my engineer’s brain kicked in. I sketched out the conundrum before us, as if writing an equation on a mental whiteboard, and started searching for solutions.

But there were none; I knew that. I could solve some of her immediate concerns, of course, but like Hilbert’s problems, the most critical ones had no solutions.

I leaned against the wall and closed my eyes. My nightmares seemed like a mercy now; at least my subconscious had the decency to put her out of her misery quickly.

Reality was not so kind. Her father was dead. If not literally, then effectively. But it would take her weeks, possibly months of scraping at the barrel of hope to figure that out.

And I of all people knew what a hell that was.