Paradox (18 page)

Just above the stitching is a wide green stain, which looks an awful lot like grass.

It
is
a grass stain.

How does she know these things?

Then she notices something else: she’s wearing a nametag again—just like the one she removed back in the rocket. It’s got the same cheap plastic holder, the same silvery pin. With trembling fingers Ana unclips the little plastic tag. The paper inside is very different from the nearly blank one she saw last time. This tag is ringed by a red border, with small red letters along the bottom:
SAVITECH
. Above this is a small thumbnail photo of a girl with dark brown eyes and cropped hair and a stony expression. Next to the image is printed:
ANA ORTEZ
.

Does the girl look familiar? Ana can’t say. She looks like
someone out of a dream, someone not quite known but not unknown, either. Bile rises in Ana’s throat at the thought that she is looking at her own photograph and she doesn’t recognize herself.

What is going on here?

Her head is steadier now and Ana turns her body, very slowly, keeping her left hand on the bed for support. She glances down and freezes in place.

Thick, ropy scars wind over the back of her hand, the backs of both hands—lacing each of her fingers, covering her wrists like vines before creeping under her long sleeves and out of sight.

Whose
hands are these?

She doesn’t remember these hands—but she knows them. Knows with the rock-bottom solidity that has come with each of her regained bits of knowledge that these are
her
hands,
her
scars,
her … guilt?

The word jumps out at her, but she can’t deal with it right now, can’t remember, doesn’t want to remember. These are her hands, her clothes, her body. That’s enough for now.

What really matters is figuring out where she is and what’s going on.

She slides her feet off the bed and rests them on the floor. She’s wearing white canvas sneakers—no more hiking boots. She tests the injury in her shoulder by shrugging it. Nothing. No pain at all.

How long have I been here?

In front of her bed stands an IV drip with a tube dangling down loose. But the bag that held the liquid is empty, the tube dry. Ana tries to lick her lips again. Is that why she is so parched? Maybe whoever has her here is due to come fill up the device.

Or has given up on keeping her alive.

The room is small, with a narrow space around each side of the bed. And all the equipment …

Ana’s attention snags on a wide readout panel that fills the head of her bed, like a spider’s body with its wire limbs dangling to connect to a wide black band. The band she now knows was fastened around her forehead. So, wires that were connected
to her
. The main face of the panel is a wide display screen. It’s gray with static and is also the source of that faint beeping that she’s been hearing on the fringes of her awareness.

For a moment Ana wonders what was on the readout before she disconnected herself from it. There’s something at the edge of her mind, something she thinks she might remember if she tried hard enough—but right now she’s too frantic to try bringing it back. If she even could.

Ana stands, pausing just long enough to be sure her legs will hold her—and they do, with just the barest tremble—before shuffling to the end of the bed.

At the far side of the room, to the left of her bed, is a doorway with clear plastic strips hanging from the frame. Across from it, on the right wall, is a heavy door marked
EXIT
.

Ana contemplates the door with the plastic strips. Why can she suddenly remember the feel of them slapping across her face? Was she carried through them? Did she walk through them on her own? Shaking herself, wishing she could shake some of the cobwebs out of her brain as well, she turns to the heavy door and pushes through.

She finds herself in a large room with office cubicles to one side and a lounge area to the other. A big set of glass double doors lies directly across the room from her, leading into an outer hallway.

Ana steps into the main area and looks around. The air is cooler here, but it smells horrible, a stench like nothing she’s ever smelled before. In the lounge area there’s a pink velour couch facing a coffee table and a flat-screen television mounted on the wall. The television is on, its screen showing a vacant, pixelated pattern.

Right next to the television is a water cooler. Ana nearly falls on top of it in her relief. She downs five cups of water in quick succession, and the cold liquid helps to settle her thoughts. There has to be a logical explanation for all of this. She just needs to keep looking.

Dropping her cup in the trash, she turns back to face the couch. It’s big and soft and suddenly, something about it looms sharp in her mind. There’s a spot between the two middle cushions where the springs have bent to the side and left a hiding place….

How do I know that?

Ana is standing over the couch before she realizes she’s moved. As her hand slides between the cushions, she already knows what she’s going to find.

She pulls out a scrap of paper no bigger than the palm of her hand. Scrawled in blue ballpoint ink is:

O+O

The same message that was scribbled at the bottom of her instructions from the rocket. She pats her shirt where her pocket used to be, but of course the letter is gone, along with her missing jumpsuit.

There’s a picture window perpendicular to the couch. Letting the scrap of paper fall to the floor, she moves toward the window. Outside, the sky is not pink or peach or raspberry; it’s blue. Dark, midnight blue. There’s a single moon, round and full, rising over the edge of a tall building.

There are buildings everywhere. The window she’s looking from is high off the ground—ten, maybe twenty stories up. She can see the roofs of buildings all around her, some flat, some shingled, some with little rooftop gardens. There’s water in the distance, glinting black in the moonlight.

And electricity. There are streetlights below her.

Federal Street, she knows suddenly. Downtown Boston. Massachusetts.

She isn’t on Paradox anymore. She’s back on Earth.

She’s home.

Ana chokes back a sob. She runs her hands over her face and feels the series of faint depressions on her forehead where
the suction marks from the probes and electrodes on her forehead band must have been attached. But the rest of her skin is perfectly smooth and healthy. There’s no sign of the deep gouge she received in the Dead Forest. For the wound to have healed so completely … how long has she been back?

Once she lost consciousness at the colony, she must have been put immediately into suspended animation and into a rocket home. Four months’ travel—
how do I know this, without knowing that I know?
—that should be plenty of time to explain her good-as-new shoulder, the way her other bruises and cuts have faded.

What about her hands, though? Where did all these new scars come from?

Her legs have started shaking and she can’t seem to make them stop. She turns from the window and walks toward the television she noticed earlier, its screen still bright and blank. There’s a remote on the coffee table and she picks it up, hovering over the
off
command, then she pauses. She slides her finger to the left and scrolls through the channels instead. The next channel shows the same empty display. As does the next, and the next.
What’s going on?

Something
has to be connected!

Finally, she finds a channel with a picture. It’s a newscast set, a room dominated by a large desk. On the wall behind the desk is a bright logo saying WCN-TODAY. At the bottom of the screen is the flashing red word:
LIVE!

The picture is tilted ever so slightly, as if someone bumped
the camera and didn’t bother to fix it. And there are no people in the frame.

Or … are there?

Ana leans closer to the screen, then gasps.

The newscaster’s desk is empty, but on the floor partly hidden behind the desk a man with black wire-frame glasses is lying on his back, one arm half covering his face.

A face dark with blood.

Ana jerks back from the screen. On live television? Where is the camera operator, where are the lighting technicians, where are the network executives?

And suddenly, she thinks she knows what’s going on. There’s only one place she can remember seeing that kind of blood, that kind of death: inside a twisting memory strand that rippled across the face of an alien planet.

Her heart sinking, Ana turns to take in the rest of the room. The cubicles that fill the main office area look familiar, and not from some shadowy half-memory. This room, this place—she’s seen it recently.

She saw it through Bailey’s eyes.

This is the room where Bailey died.

Ana steps around the couch and moves toward the rows of cubicles. She follows a narrow walkway through the dividers toward the back of the room.

Bailey walked here, just like this, but how long ago?

Ana passes the sign-up sheet for a lunch that will never be ordered, passes a framed award that no one cares about any longer, passes a fold in the carpet that Bailey tripped over in another world, in another life.

Bailey’s desk is pin-neat, with two ballpoint pens placed at right angles to a spiral notebook; a cherry-red cup of congealed coffee sits in the center of a mosaic-tiled coaster; a wide, slim monitor shows a screen full of multicolored fish. On the rim of the monitor is a yellow sticky note with the scrawl:
Call Brian!

Ana catches her breath and moves inside the cube. The phone is on the right side of the desk, half hidden by the back of Bailey’s swivel chair.

On the desk, next to the phone, there is a hand.

Ana moves the chair, and a body—
Bailey’s body, still wearing its white lab coat
—tumbles to the floor. Bailey’s eyes are wide and fixed. Her long blond curls are stuck to the side of her face and caked with blood.

Ana’s heart is pounding like thunder in her ears as she reaches down to touch Bailey’s hand. It’s stone cold.

She sees now that there are smears of blood everywhere—on the desk, on the chair, on the carpet. Something inside her curls into a tight ball. Not until now was Bailey truly real to her; it’s as if Bailey has both come to life and died in the same moment.

Choking back a sob, Ana folds Bailey’s arms across her chest, wishing there were something she could do, knowing it’s far too late. And also wishing—
selfishly, I know this
—that Bailey could have been alive to tell her what’s going. To help provide some answers.

She stands up, and her hip jostles Bailey’s desk. The fish swimming across the monitor fade out, replaced by a brightly colored desktop littered with icons. There’s a console pocket just below the rim of the desk.

Maybe there’s nothing she can do for Bailey. But the answers—
who am I? where am I? what’s going on?
—might not yet be out of Ana’s reach.

Sliding Bailey’s chair to the side—she can’t bring herself to sit down in it—Ana kneels in front of the desk and slides both hands into the console pocket. Within the silky inner pocket, magnetic imaging gloves tighten into place around her fingers.

There’s a moment of uncertainty while her blank memory wonders what to do, but then her fingers start moving. She knows this. She might not remember it, but her body
knows
.

With barely perceptible movements, Ana reaches into the computer, watching her actions play out on the screen as she sorts through folders. A window pops up with a file list and she scrolls through it. There’s so much here, and she has no idea where to start.

She doesn’t even know what she’s looking for.

She browses, opens, closes, clicks, groans in frustration. There’s
too much
! And none of it feels at all relevant.

Giving up on the file list, she pulls up a display of recently activated programs. Something catches her eye: an icon with the image of a tiny planet. The label says
PARASIM
. Ana selects the program, and it pops up from a minimized window. The program was already running.

The screen erupts with information: lists and coordinates and arrows and features and taglines and buttons. It’s obviously a world of work and care and monitoring. But monitoring
what
?

At the top of the window, a pale pink speech bubble is gently flashing. Ana clicks on it, and it opens up a chat window:

Ana positions the cursor to hover over the T/O, which must signify the originator of the message, and sees TODD OSLOW.

What?

She’s looking at the last in a long series of messages. Ana scrolls back up to the top of the window and sees more pale pink bubbles from TODD OSLOW, yellow ones from YSA KLEIN, and blue ones from CHEN WAI.

Ana feels suddenly dizzy. The messages from Todd begin with random updates: