Atlantia Series 1: Survivor (15 page)

A flock of winged animals fluttered through the sky high above her head, chasing and wheeling through the warm air near a rainbow cast in the vapour from the waterfall, and she realised that for the first time since she had awoken she no longer felt cold.

Slowly, as though she were dreaming and feared that any sudden motion would exterminate the illusion, she stepped down off the grassy mound and walked to the edge of the pool, its surface shimmering in the light from the sky. She dipped her foot into the water, gasped at the warmth and plunged into it as though it were the first time she had felt it upon her skin.

The warmth consumed her, enveloped her in an embrace that drew a broad smile across her lips beneath the mask. She twisted and turned in the water, rubbed her hands across her body and drenched her filthy hair, splashed it up under the mask until it stung her eyes. For a moment, just a blissful second, she forgot about the ship around her, the prison, the hostages and the hellish cell block and let the water cleanse her soul and carry her away from all that she had come to loathe.

‘Hello.’

She started at the voice, coughed as the perfect water flooded her throat as she lost her balance and her heavy mask almost dragged her under the water. She spun and saw a man standing on the shore nearby, watching her.

She touched her feet down beneath her in the water but remained submerged up to her neck as she stared at the man. He was taller than most, over six feet, and not more than thirty years old. Glossy black tangles of hair framed a jaw that was perhaps a little too wide, broad shoulders bearing the epaulettes of an officer, probably a soldier or pilot of some kind. He stood with his hands behind his back, watching her quietly.

‘The water,’ he said finally. ‘It feels good?’

She stared up at him, cautious of any response, but she realised that she recognised his voice: the officer who had ordered Bra’hiv’s men to stand down and allow Cutler and his fellow convicts to escape. Somehow, something about this man told her that she had nothing to fear.

She nodded, once.

He smiled. ‘My name is Andaim. We need to talk.’

***

Andaim stepped down to the water’s edge, his dark blue Colonial uniform resplendent in the daylight and his eyes clear. No hint of deception, no shadow of hubris. He extended one hand toward her, the other holding clothes bundled under his arm.

‘Come, please,’ he said. ‘You can’t bathe properly with that monstrosity on your head. If you try to swim you’ll sink and I’ll end up talking to your feet.’

Now she froze. She heard her breathing against the metallic surface of the mask, felt again the pain where it rubbed, the sore skin where it pinched her head, the things that she had for so long managed to push to the back of her mind now seeming unbearably painful.

Andaim reached out more closely for her.

‘Please. Enemy or friend, that horrible thing must come off somehow. Let me help you. Meyanna is waiting.’

She hesitated, watching him through the slits, and in some small part of her mind she realised that she did not actually now know if she wanted to remove the mask. For so long it had been a shield behind which to hide from a cruel and uncaring universe.

‘You can’t hide forever,’ Andaim said, as though reading her mind. ‘You’ll be better off without it. Or would you wish to be silenced forever more?’

She stared at his hand, and then slowly she reached up and took it.

Andaim pulled her gently toward him and she walked up and out of the water. Andaim’s eyes remained fixed upon hers, never once drifting down to her body as she stood on the bank, her skin glistening in the sunlight. He handed her the clothes, a white hooded robe, and politely turned his back to her as she quickly dressed.

‘This way,’ Andaim gestured, when she was ready.

She followed him, walking along the bank as they skirted the edge of the beautiful pool. More birds fluttered through soaring tree tops as he led her down a winding path through a lush forest. The sunlight cut through the canopy far above in shafts of shimmering gold that dappled the foliage around them, the ground beneath her feet soft as she walked.

‘The whole interior of the Atlantia’s for’ard hull rotates,’ Andaim explained as they walked, ‘a shell within the body of the ship. The rotation produces acceleration equal to normal gravity, keeping our feet on the ground.’ He pointed up to the sky above them. ‘Just as well: the birds would be in chaos otherwise.’

The path led out of the forest and up a hill until Andaim stopped on a ridge. She joined him and found herself overlooking a plain, swaying grasses sweeping across the valley around them, and beyond mountain ranges soaring to untold heights. To their right, the shore of a vast ocean stretched away into infinity. She walked past Andaim and cast her gaze across the beautiful vista, smelled the odour of the ocean and felt the cooler breath of the mountains.

Scything across the plain, a river shone in the sunlight like liquid metal as it drained toward the ocean.

‘Impressive, isn’t it?’ Andaim asked.

She nodded, elated at the sheer spectacle. Somewhere in her mind she knew that it was all an illusion, the sense of scale a wonder of technological know–how and optical trickery, but still the child within her wanted it to be real enough that her brain suspended its disbelief.

‘Here,’ Andaim said. ‘I have something for you.’

She turned and Andaim gestured to a reclining chair set near the treeline, beside which stood Meyanna. Alpha saw beside the chair a device not dissimilar to the welding torch she had been given to torture Officer C’rairn with. The memory cautioned her and she did not move.

‘It’s a laser cutter,’ Meyanna explained. ‘It’ll get through that mask in no time, if you’ll let me.’

She hesitated still, staring at the chair.

‘You have to be debriefed by the lieutenant,’ Meyanna said, gesturing to Andaim. ‘We thought it would be easier for you here than in the holding cells, and you can’t speak with that horrific thing on your head.’

Andaim turned to her. ‘Can you trust me, even though you don’t know me?’ She looked at him as he went on. ‘You would not have been brought here to be harmed. Far from it, in fact. We know what you did. You saved lives. You know what the Word says: an eye for an eye, right? That works both ways.’

Andaim turned and walked across to the chair. He picked up the laser cutter and tested it, the sharp clicking noise sounding out of place amid nature’s elegant harmony around her.

Andaim looked at her expectantly, and she walked toward the chair.

‘Just lay down,’ Meyanna said as she took the cutter from Andaim. ‘I’ll be as gentle as I can.’

She sat down on the edge of the chair, careful not to turn her back to them, and then swung her legs up onto the chair and lay back. Andaim sat beside her and then reached out and carefully took the mask in his grip. Meyanna moved the cutter close to her face, and then pushed Alpha’s head gently so that she was forced to look away from them.

The cutter clicked loudly and she smelled an acrid stench of burning metal and saw thin wispy clouds of blue smoke smoulder up into the air above them as Meyanna worked.

‘It’s a mechanical lock,’ Andaim said as Meyanna cut through the mask. ‘Very simple, very solid, impossible to cheat. I’ve heard each of these masks comes with a unique key which is held back at the colonies. No other way for us to get this thing off, I’m afraid.’

Meyanna continued working, coughing and resting occasionally as the fumes became too dense. Alpha’s neck was beginning to ache as Andaim held her head in place but then she heard something crack, felt heat against the back of her neck.

‘Stand by,’ Andaim said.

She tensed, waiting, and then she felt her skin hiss and a terrible pain sear her as the cutter broke through the metal brace securing the mask to the back of her head. Instantly, Meyanna stopped cutting as Andaim grabbed a cup of water from beside him and poured it across her neck, the water icy cold. She felt the pain recede immediately, felt a dizzying sense of relief as Andaim gripped the brace and pulled it away from her skin.

‘One more to go,’ he said.

Meyanna went to work again, this time tilting Alpha’s head back so that she could attack the brace beneath her jaw.

The cutter clicked, the metal hissed and spat dense fumes, but the thinner metal of the jaw brace yielded more quickly than the one behind her head, and within a few minutes Andaim was dousing the slim wound on her neck with the icy water.

She felt suddenly nervous as he lifted the brace away, and a pain that she had forgotten existed beneath her jaw suddenly vanished. Meyanna set the cutter down beside them and then pulled the brace out of the way. She looked down at Alpha through the slits in her mask, and smiled.

‘Okay, you ready?’

Alpha swallowed thickly and was suddenly very conscious of the metalwork against the inside of her throat, sore and dry. Andaim saw her throat move and nodded.

‘We’ll do that first.’

Andaim reached out and his fingers brushed her lips gently as he took a firm hold of the metal probes. ‘Tilt your head back further,’ he instructed, ‘and we’ll do this in one smooth go, no hesitations okay?’

She tilted her head back, felt her throat constrict as the metal pressed against it and then relaxed as she positioned herself where the resistance was the weakest.

‘Okay,’ Andaim said, ‘on three. One. Two…’

She wretched as Andaim pulled hard on the metal probes sooner than she anticipated, and they were yanked from her throat along with what felt like half of her tongue before she could react or prevent him from moving. She glimpsed the probes flash past in front of her eyes and a trail of scarlet–tinted saliva that glistened in the sunlight as Andaim hurled the probes to one side.

She rolled off the bench to slump on her hands and knees on the grass. She coughed up bile, her throat feeling as though it were on fire. Her breath rasped in her throat and wheezed in her chest as she blinked tears from her eyes, and as her vision cleared so she stared at the grass beneath her.

Gone were the slits and the black metal.

She felt cool air on her cheeks, on her eyes, in her hair where it caressed her like the gentle touch of a mother’s hand. She blinked and saw the plain grey metallic interior of the mask on the grass beneath her where it had fallen.

She stared at it, unable to move from where she knelt.

Meyanna’s hand appeared, and in it was a cup of water.

Alpha grasped for the cup and threw it to her lips, drained it as though it were the only remaining water in the universe. It quenched her thirst and caressed the inside of her throat, cold and clear. She felt the tears that spilled down her cheeks but she did not hide them as she poured the next cup of water that Meyanna handed her across her face, felt it touch skin that had long since been dry and sore.

As she knelt, her eyes closed and her face tilted up to meet the sunlight, she heard Andaim’s voice close by.

‘Please tell me,’ he said. ‘What is your name?’

She opened her mouth to speak and her voice cracked, a feeble whisper that seemed to struggle up from somewhere deep inside to flutter free for what felt like the first time in aeons. Her voice sounded alien to her own ears.

‘My name,’ she rasped, ‘is Evelyn.’

***

Andaim mouthed the name silently as he watched her.

‘You are an incredibly brave woman, Evelyn,’ Meyanna said as she packed away the laser cutter. ‘What you did back there in the prison hull saved a lot of lives, including mine. It makes me wonder why you were ever made to wear that mask?’

Evelyn slowly rolled onto her back on the grass, revelling in the warm sunlight that caressed her skin and the relief of damp water in her throat, a soft smile touching her lips as she lay with her eyes closed.

‘I don’t care to remember,’ she replied, her voice still rough.

‘We care,’ Andaim said.

She turned her head to look at the officer, her brow furrowed. ‘Why?’

‘You risked your life to save others,’ Meyanna said. ‘How could we not care?’

Evelyn watched the two of them for a few moments.

‘I am a convict, a killer.’

‘Are you?’ Meyanna asked. ‘We’ve see nothing to suggest you’re anything other than a human being.’

Evelyn frowned. ‘I can’t remember.’

‘You may have had your memory altered,’ Meyanna said. ‘We just don’t know much right now, not after what happened. We don’t know half of what the Word may have been up to before…’

Meyanna broke off.

‘Ethera?’ Evelyn asked. ‘Caneeron?’

It was Andaim who replied, shaking his head. ‘Gone,’ he said. ‘Or at least the people are, long lost.’

‘The planet we’re orbiting,’ Evelyn said. ‘I saw it.’

‘We’re not on the colonies now, Evelyn,’ Meyanna explained, and a realisation began to dawn in her expression. ‘Just how much do you remember?’

Evelyn frowned, her eyes becoming vacant for a moment. ‘Nothing,’ she said, and then whispered: ‘Just sadness.’

Meyanna looked down at the tiny woman before her. ‘That’s something we all remember. Every last one of us.’

Meyanna picked up her bag and turned away. Evelyn made to get up and follow her but Andaim reached out and rested a hand gently on her forearm.

‘It’s okay,’ Meyanna said as she looked back. ‘I have to attend to the hostages, but Andaim will stay here in the sanctuary with you for now. I’ll be back as soon as I can.’

Evelyn watched as the captain’s wife walked away.

‘Why did you ask for amnesty for Qayin?’ Andaim asked her. ‘He’s a real killer, maybe the most dangerous man aboard this ship.’

Evelyn sighed and looked out over the plain. ‘He’s misunderstood.’

Andaim almost snorted a laugh. ‘I’ll say. If you don’t remember anything, how can you say that about Qayin?’

Evelyn blinked. ‘I don’t know, I just… I understand him, but I can’t remember why.’

‘That won’t hold up in a court.’

‘Not much a convict says does,’ she replied. ‘So I learned.’

‘What the Word thinks of you doesn’t hold sway here on the Atlantia. Practicalities are what matters and you earned yourself a lot of respect, in my eyes anyway.’