somewhere, maybe avoid thinking for a while. There you go. Feeling nothing at all is better than feeling like this; that’s just logic. Go.
Sarya listened to that part of her brain, and that’s why she’s here now. She has climbed, with these bloodied fingertips, to the top of the ship’s [Backbone]. That’s what her Network overlay labels this vertical spine of metal ladders and grated flooring that connects every deck of this awful ship. There’s a single hatch up here, and she could not care less what is behind it. A stale and mechanical air current dries the sweat on her face and shifts the mangled hair on her forehead. The combined drone of ventilation and old lighting tickles her ears while the subsonic hum of the reactor vibrates through the soles of her boots. The three combine into one sound in her brain, the heartbeat of an old starship in operation.
She doesn’t know why she’s up here, exactly. All she knows is that she has to go somewhere or she’ll go insane. She gazes down past the tips of her own boots, down the ladder, through three layers of grated flooring, to an orange pressure door set in the floor. It’s well named, this backbone. It’s skeletal. It lends support. It even looks diseased, like its host body has developed bone cancer and refused treatment. The safety cages that surround every ladder on Watertower are missing here; they’ve been ripped away along with large chunks of floor. Hood’s doing, she assumes, since he wouldn’t have fit through those tiny openings. Or maybe it was that big guy who brought her to her room. He looked like the type who makes a hobby of ripping holes in metal gratings. Or maybe it just doesn’t matter, says the dark and soothing part of her brain. Your mother is gone. Your home is gone. Nothing will matter ever again. Go.
She breathes mechanically, manually. All right, she tells her body, now reach for the ladder. One hand. Both. Turn around and switch them. One boot and then the other, the metal ringing with every step. The rungs are cool and solid in her hands, rough from the safety paint that remains between gouges. Her head drops below the top grating and then the safety doors recessed into the walls below it. Now comes the [Maintenance] half-level, says her Network unit. It’s so short she would have to duck her head to step off onto the floor grating here. She doesn’t bother; the door is closed, sealed down the center, and her registration certainly won’t change that.
Another few meters down and she is at [Quarters]. A dim corridor leads toward the back of the ship, ending in a [Galley] full of food bars she probably can’t eat. The hallway is lined with hatches on both sides, which are identical except for one with the talon marks that show evidence of the big guy. Mer, there we go, that’s his name. She remembers him saying it multiple times as he hauled her up the ladders—he said it slowly, like she’s an idiot. Which is nothing new.
She’s one rung above the orange door in the floor. There’s a switch here, and she burns most of her remaining strength to push its contacts closed. She notices there’s blood on it when she pulls her hand away. And then with a clank and the grind of bad bearings the hatch divides in half, and she is suspended over a hole into darkness.
Go.
She very nearly wonders what is driving her right now, what dark part of her forebrain wants her down there in that cargo hold. But that part is in control, and the concern never quite materializes. She hangs on with one hand and watches herself lift the Network unit off her head. The same hand pulls the earbuds out of their homes and lets their magnetic clasps click to the projector. She loops it twice around the ladder and now her gift hangs there, sparkling in the flickering light of the backbone. She went through a lot for that gift, says some quieter part of her mind, and now she’s just going to leave it there?
Sarya descends. She passes out of the warm air of the top of the ship and into the cold of the cargo hold as if plunging into freezing water. The air is so frigid that her first breath explodes into the white vapor of a coughing fit. She clears her