Lightless (22 page)

It made it even less comprehensible to her that he would have ever left Earth when he seemed to truly miss it.

“But,” Ivan said very softly and slowly indeed, “even so, when we left Luna, we went on a strangely precise trajectory. And so for a long time, as we were flying away, the Earth and the moon were right beside each other, like a child's model, and North America was facing us just as evening was falling, the lights of cities starting up in the east and traveling slowly west until the planet was too far away to see.”

Althea had seen that image herself, beautiful, old, and perfect. She could hear his reverence for the planet, and she could hear a deep affection that until now Ivanov had kept well hidden.

“You miss him,” Althea said.

“Yes,” said Ivan, without lies and pretense.

Somewhere Matthew Gale was rotting in a metal coffin, falling in toward the sun. Another loss for Leontios Ivanov.

Perhaps it was because she knew of Mattie dead and of Constance and Milla Ivanov in danger, or perhaps because she, too, had seen the cruelty of Ida Stays's eyes, or perhaps it was just because Ivanov had been honest with her, but Althea found the courage to ask, “Why did you leave Earth if you miss it so much? You were rich, had a bright future—you already lived on Earth. The System would have hired you in a second, even with—your father.”

“I know,” said Ivanov.

Althea said, “Did you leave Earth for the same reasons you tried to kill yourself when you were there?”

Ivanov was silent for a long time. His lack of an answer made the air seem heavier by the moment, like the anxious guilt curling in her chest.

“Did Ida ask you to ask me about that?” he said.

“No,” Althea said, her fingers skittering restlessly over the edges of the keyboard, and almost regretted asking. “I was just…I just wondered.”

“If you promise not to tell anyone, then I'll tell you.”

She had expected him to turn on her, or to deny everything, or to simply refuse to say anything more. She had not expected him to answer the question.

That was not a promise Althea could keep. Simply talking to him was wrong enough. She would be able to wheedle her way out of trouble—serious trouble if Miss Stays ever found out—only by protesting that the discussions did not have to do with anything important. And even then she was on shaky ground.

On the other hand…

The camera in this part of the hallway was not working.

Althea looked up into it. Its black eye stared down at her, but whatever the
Ananke
saw, it was not sharing it with the System.

No one would know unless Althea or Ivanov told them. But to make the promise was to move from a gray area into the black, to deliberately keep information from her superiors, to be in some measure
insubordinate
.

“I promise,” Althea said.

Ivanov had to know what she was promising, but he said nothing about it. Instead, as if Althea's promise had unlocked his tongue, he said, “Earth isn't as wonderful as you think it is. There's more surveillance there than there is on the outermost dwarf planets all combined.”

“So it's safe,” Althea said, puzzled, because that was what the surveillance was at its core: a guarantee that nothing could happen to you that the System, omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent, wouldn't know.

There was a silence as if Ivanov were working himself up to speak. “Yes,” he said at last in measured tones, “it's safe. Like everyone being locked up in separate cages is safe. No one else can get at you, but you're still in a cage. Especially if they think you're predisposed to be dangerous.”

“So you tried to kill yourself because you felt trapped,” Althea said, trying to understand.

“Yes and no,” said Ivanov. “At first I thought—Some people's brains don't work quite right.” He hesitated a moment, then said, “It's something in the programming.”

Althea lifted her chin, listening closely.

“You can't change it, because that's part of what makes them who they are,” said Ivan, and Althea thought of her machines and her programs, all with their unique little quirks, their personalities. She thought of the ones that did not run quite correctly or that ran in strange ways. People, she'd always thought, had less of a spectrum in their quality; either they worked perfectly and worked well within the System or they were flawed, bad bits of code, like Ivanov or Gale.

It was harder now to think of Ivan as nothing more than a flaw in the System.

“But I feel,” said Ivan, “all the time like I'm clinging to a rotting old pier over a cold sea, and I'm soaked to the skin from the spray and the rain. And it's all I can do to hang on to the edge of the pier, because—there's a woman in the water, a woman with dead eyes who's part of the ocean itself, and she's got one icy hand around my ankle and she's trying to drag me down with her into the ocean.”

For an instant she could taste the salt, feel the frigid spray, the cold slick fingers around her ankle like a manacle.

“And I'm so tired of hanging on,” Ivan said. He almost seemed to be talking to someone other than her, to himself or to someone who wasn't there, and it sent a chill down Althea's spine. “There's a hollow dark place inside my ribs instead of flesh and blood, and sometimes I just want to go down with her. On Earth I had no reason not to go down with her. Out here I have—I have reasons not to let go.”

Ida was aware of how close she stood to the edge. Her reputation, her force of personality, had brought her this far, but she had to get results. The System did not believe her theory about Ivanov and Gale, but after Titania, with the threat of worse to come, they were letting her take the risk because they were desperate for some success. But the burden of success was solely on her. She'd thought she'd had six more days; she had fewer now, however long it was between today and the Mallt-y-Nos's next attack. If the Mallt-y-Nos attacked again and Ida still had nothing to tell the System—if she failed to get anything out of Harper or Doctor Ivanov—

It was not worth thinking about. She would get results. She was always right, always.

Time was ticking down. She could feel it in her bones like a bomb on a timer of unknown duration. It was not
would
it blow but
when,
and the constant knowledge that that unknown
when
drew ever more near.

“Milla Ivanov will arrive first,” she told Domitian as they walked together down the hall toward her second makeshift interrogation chamber. “Constance Harper second. The time of Harper's arrival will overlap with Doctor Ivanov's departure, so be ready.”

“You intend for them to meet,” Domitian said carefully, asking without asking.

Ida allowed herself to smile, but she knew it came out stiff and fierce.

“If both of them are as innocent as Ivanov claims, then they have never met before,” she said. “Let's find out if they have.”

Ivan had not spoken since his confession, and Althea had kept the silence from her end. It was as if his words had spun a hollow shell of glass around the two of them; no matter what Althea said, her words would shatter the glass and she would not be able to go back to the way things were before.

Domitian arrived in that fragile silence with no more than a nod at her, although his eyes lingered on her face for a moment longer than she wanted to meet them, as if he were looking for something from her: anger or acceptance or apology. Althea did not have the courage to answer his silence, either. The moment was brief; Domitian did not waste time on unnecessary things. He opened the door to Ivan's cell, his gun black and gleaming in one hand.

“On your feet, facing the wall,” said Domitian. Althea peered through the tiny window made by Domitian's arm and the wall and saw Ivan, pale and slender, with his brilliant blue eyes darkly shadowed, rise slowly to his feet. Althea watched Domitian cuff him roughly and wondered why Ida Stays had seen fit to dress him in thin white hospital clothes, as if he were ill.

Domitian got a hand in the crook of Ivan's elbow and hauled him out of the tiny cell and into the hallway, leading him away. Ivan did not look at Althea once. Perhaps he, too, found it easier to speak to Althea through the door, when they could not see each other's faces.

She found herself unaccountably on the edge of tears, and it frustrated her, and so when she signaled Gagnon about a note he had left her in the comments of some code he had been examining, she was sharp and snappish. “It doesn't make any sense,” she said over the intercom. “What do you mean, ‘the rewriting is constants'?”

“I mean exactly what that means,” said Gagnon with such maddening uselessness that she briefly visualized beating his head against the walls of the
Ananke
until through the power of percussive maintenance the ship resumed normal operating status. “Except without the typo. The rewriting is constant; the ship keeps rewriting any fixes I make to that part of the code.”

“That doesn't make any sense,” Althea snapped.

“The problem we're facing, summed up in one sentence,” Gagnon said drily.

“I don't want quips,” Althea said. “I want you to actually achieve what I tell you to do!”

A brief pause filled by the static sound of silence through the intercom's speakers and then true silence as the connection cut off.

Althea, it seemed, could do nothing without guilt today. She bent over the machine and tried to put aside thoughts of Gagnon, and Ivan, and her own frustration. She was not having much success five minutes later when the sound of footsteps came down the hall, and she turned only reluctantly to see Gagnon walking down toward her, his hands in his pockets, his red hair starting to fall into his face in thin, wispy flyaways. He stopped beside her and said, as if there were no hurry and he hadn't just left his post unmanned, “What's up?”

“Nothing,” Althea said. “I'm busy.”

Gagnon was nodding and frowning at the same time in the way that Althea hated because it meant he was understanding something about her that she didn't want him to understand. “Didn't sound like nothing,” he said.

“Shouldn't you be in the control room?”

He leaned against the wall with one shoulder, boxing her in, too close. Althea suddenly had a flash of a memory from when she was a child, when a little boy had come and leaned over her shoulder too close and tried to take away her computer from her. She'd punched and kicked him until he'd run away.

“Doctor Ivanov and Harper aren't scheduled for another fifteen minutes,” he said.

“But they'll enter
Ananke
's sensor range soon,” said Althea.

He made that frowning, nodding face again.

“You're right,” he agreed. “I should really be up there. You know, you should answer my question so I can get back up there in time.”

“I answered your question.”

“Lying isn't answering the question.”

“Who are you, Ida Stays?” Althea snapped, and immediately wished she could have kept her mouth shut.

Gagnon was regarding her steadily. “Is this about Miss Stays? Has she been giving you a hard time?”

“No,” Althea said, but she glanced against her will toward Ivan's open cell.

Gagnon followed her gaze. “This is about the prisoner?” he asked. “Has
he
been bothering you?”

“No!” Althea said too vehemently, she decided after saying it, and tried to calm her tone. “He hasn't been bothering me.”

“But…?”

“But I feel bad for him,” Althea said, and it seemed like only the barest, meanest explanation of what she felt.

Gagnon was looking at her, perfectly baffled. “Why?” he asked.

“Because”—now that she had opened the subject, it seemed easier to express—“because of his mother, and because of…of Constance, and because Miss Stays is torturing him…”

“Miss Stays isn't torturing him,” Gagnon said, sounding amused but looking at her with something too close to concern. “Has he been talking to you?”

“Ivanov?” Althea asked, stalling, having remembered to use his surname at the last moment.

Gagnon gave her a look as if he thought she might have been struck suddenly stupid. “Sometimes,” Althea admitted, and Gagnon's expression darkened.

“Damn it, Al,” he said. “And you've been listening to him.”

“I can't not hear when he talks.”

“Yeah, but you've been
listening
.” Althea did not like the look on Gagnon's face; it skated too close to the expression that meant he was going to tell Domitian.

“I'm not going to tell Domitian,” he said, and she was embarrassed to have been so obvious. “I just…” He stopped and chewed on the inside of his lip. “I'll make sure he stops bothering you, Al,” he said.

Althea tried to ask what he meant by that, but her words were drowned out by the sudden wailing of the
Ananke
's alarm.

Ida burst out of her second interrogation room at the screaming alarm, looking up and down the hallway for someone to demand answers from.

The ship screamed and wailed as she hurried down to the control room and unlocked the door, but there was no one inside.

“Son of a bitch,” she hissed, and then snapped at the ceiling, “Enough!” without really expecting to be heard.

The ship continued deafly blaring that deafening sound.

Running footsteps. Ida turned to see Gagnon coming up the hallway, followed by the shorter, wild-haired figure of Althea Bastet. Gagnon avoided Ida's gaze—a sign of guilt; doubtless he was the one who was supposed to be manning the control room—but Althea's round brown eyes lingered on hers for a moment before breaking away, and Ida could not quite read her expression.

It was unimportant. Ida had full control over the ship once again. However Doctor Bastet would rather things be was entirely irrelevant.