The Loneliness of Distant Beings

Chapter Thirty-One

Dom is waiting on the service stairs one flight down, backpack on, jacket done up, cap jammed down, and he pulls me against him, touches his lips to mine, takes my cold hand in his and we are running so hard, so fast, that I can barely speak, that I can barely hold on to Mariana as she follows me.

'Mariana's coming too,' I manage to say, and he says, 'I know, isn't it perfect?' And I want to kiss him then but I can't because all we do is run, run, run until we get to one of the West service transporters and we call it. And while we are standing there listening to the grinding sound of it arriving and praying it will be empty, he pulls me into the crook of his arm against the warmth of him and I am looking up into his eyes and I am saying, 'How did this all happen so fast?'

And he says, 'I spent all last night in the explorer with Ezra.'

'You did?' And I think about Ezra then, about how he didn't need to help us at all and he did anyway and for a moment I think it's sad that I will never get to say thanks. And goodbye.

But now the transporter is arriving and, rather than look at it myself, I watch the light of it cross Dom's face and when he hits the door release with his free arm I know that it is empty.

'He got me a study pass for West Dock, no idea how but I guess he can pull strings the rest of us can only dream about.' As he talks we are sinking, deeper, passing floor after floor, and as the light stripes over us we stay back, all three half-turned to the wall and hoping that no one gets in. 'We were there all night, most of the day today too, programming the nav computer, figuring out the life systems. Flying it seems simple enough. I got a B in Basic Flight at school, so it's no big deal.'

Mariana laughs but just then we realise we are slowing, stopping, and a woman, middle-aged, engineer uniform, gets in and barely nods as she goes to lean on the side at the front and makes a call on her pod to her kids, and doesn't seem to notice that we are all three holding our breath until she steps out three floors later.

In Dock there are two guys in the gate office, visible through the window as they drink coffee and watch midnight Mass just starting on the screen, but they don't even seem to register our presence as we head for the service entrance and swipe through.

'I just knew that being stuck in Maintenance would have its perks one day.' Mariana smiles, kissing her all-access key fob, and we are in the Dock break room where the coverage of the procession is playing to an empty L-shaped bench and some crumpled paper crowns.

Out of the other door we are in the vast lower hangar and there are disembodied voices bouncing off the distant ceiling and someone singing 'Silent Night' over their own echoes. Disorientated, Dom looks back and forth before he spots the access gate to the rafts and pulls us over to it, where he swipes in and the door opens and at the same time the lights ping on in a wave all down the long, long corridor of hatches. And as we run we are passing hatch after hatch and the light down here is so blue and the walls are so white and there is this eerie intermittent buzzing sound and I am suddenly so scared that it feels like my stomach might actually just drop out and I nearly, nearly, say I don't want to go and then we are there, and Dom is releasing the hatch. I stand there watching him, I stand there shaking, while next to me Mariana looks up and then down the passage, her head flipping one way then the other then the other and her fingers twining between mine absently and then Dom is down on his knees, peering into the hatch and reaching back to take my hand and when I don't take it Mariana goes first, crawling in ahead of him while he studies me and says, 'You coming?' Watching me while I shake my head and say, 'I didn't think we'd get this far.'

And he stands and pushes my hair back off my face and says, 'But we did.'

'This is a story that ends up with us dead.'