In a minute it will be my turn in the showers, and I’ll scrub myself within an inch of my life, don my thin, gray jumpsuit, and step into the capsule. They knock us out before they get the breathing and feeding tubes in.
The girl in line behind me looks about my age, and nervous as all hell, gaze flickering around the place like it’s ricocheting off everything it lands on.
“Hi,” I say, trying on a smile.
“Hi back,” she replies, shaky.
“Apprenticeship?” I guess, aiming for distraction.
“Meteorology,” she says, her grin a little sheepish. “I’m a weather nerd. Hard not to be, growing up in Florida. We get all the weather.”
“I’m Exploration and Cartography,” I say. “Going where no one has gone before, that kind of thing. But I’ll be back at base a lot, too. We should hang out.”
She tilts her head like I’ve said something strange, and the whole scene shakes, shivers, a bright light flickering somewhere like a strobe. The girl closes her eyes against the flashes, and when she opens them again, her right eye has changed. I can still see the pupil, the black edge of the iris, but where her left eye is brown, her right has turned pure white.
“Eshvaren,” she whispers, staring at me like she doesn’t see me.
“… What?”
The whiny man in front of us in line whispers the word. “E-E-Eshvaren.”
When I whirl around, I see that his right eye has turned white, too.
“What does that mean?”
But neither of them reply. They just whisper the word again, and it spreads up and down the line like a forest catching fire.
“Eshvaren.”
“Eshvaren.”
“Eshvaren.”
Eye burning, fingers trembling, she reaches out to touch my face.
•••••
Oh, hello touch. I see you’ve decided to join us. And now that you’re here, I can tell every single part of me is hurting in ways I didn’t know had been invented yet.
Another wave of pain catches me, sweeping away the last of that creepy memory-that-wasn’t-a-dream thing and reminding me my body seems to be just as messed up as my head is right now. I’m reduced to panting, to whimpering with a raw throat that catches and gags at the effort, to just existing until the hurt starts to ebb away. But with pain, and touch, comes proper mobility. And that means I can push up onto my elbows, looking across for the guy once more. His lower half has turned dark gray, and from this I deduce he is now, unfortunately, wearing pants.
This day really is turning out to be a bust.
The pants discovery prompts a tickle of a question in my head, and I look down to check what I’m wearing. Turns out that beneath the light, silvery sheet that currently covers me, the answer is “nothing at all.”
Huh.
I look back at the boy, and at the same moment, he turns to me, his eyes widening as he realizes I’m awake. I draw breath to try and speak, but I choke, my throat stinging like someone’s ripping out my vocal cords one by one.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
“Is this Octavia?” I wheeze.
He shakes his head, blue eyes meeting mine. “What’s your name?”
“Aurora,” I manage. “Auri.”
“Tyler,” he replies.
And I should ask him where I am. If we’re on the Hadfield and I was pulled out early, or if I’m on Earth and they aborted the mission. But there’s something in his gaze that makes me shy away from the question.
He lets his forehead rest against the glass between us with a thunk. Like I did at that window on Eighty-Ninth Street. The memory catches me unawares, bringing with it a sharp wave of I-want-my-mom. This boy looks just as lost as I feel.
“Are you okay?” I whisper.
“I missed it,” he finally says. “The Draft. I missed the whole thing.”
And I’ve got no idea what a Draft is or why it’s so important. But I ask anyway.
“Had somewhere else to be?”
He nods and sighs. “Rescuing you.”
Rescuing.
That’s not a good word.
“Who knows who I got,” he says, and we both know he’s changing the subject. “I was supposed to have four of the first five picks, and now I’m stuck with the bottom of the barrel. The dregs. And I was just following reg—”
“The news isn’t all bad, Ty.”
The low purr comes from somewhere outside my field of vision. A girl’s voice.
Tyler swings away from me like I’m yesterday’s news, plastering himself against the front of his holding tank. “Scarlett.”
I carefully turn my gaze that way—it still takes thought and strategy, my body