~ CAROLINE ~

Caroline removed the tie from her hair, letting it flow free. It was untidy, in need of a brush, but it could keep until she got back to her bedchamber. Now, she just wanted to savour the quiet. It had been a long shift, tiring even though she’d been sedentary for much of it. When she’d arrived, eight hours earlier, Tema Caerlin had told her that Jem was in a bad way. Now he was dead. She’d kept vigil until the last.

Jem was the impenetrable mystery. For all the time he was in her care, she’d been intrigued by him. His very existence went against what they were assuming to be true, to begin with. Essegena had never before been colonised, that was what everyone said. But he’d got here somehow. And then there were the wounds. They were grievous wounds, mortal without a doubt. It was a miracle he lived as long as he did.

Therein lay the contradiction. Blood loss had killed him, in the end. Even after several weeks of intense care, his blood refused to clot. There was no trace of scar tissue. The cuts just kept bleeding. Emmeline had been right to worry about the supplies; they’d been burning through plasma and stitches like they’d never run out, and it was only when Lily Day had finished conducting an inventory check and given Caro the figures that she’d realised the true extent of the situation. From then on, it had been a matter of days before she could no longer justify keeping him alive.

It wasn’t as if he’d punctured an artery. If he had, death would have been far quicker coming. The cuts were to the veins, though, and she had thought she might be able to stitch them up. But as Tema had told her, the stitches would not hold. For a little while they’d tried to replace the outgoing blood with plasma from the stores. Doctor Staniforth had put a stop to that, while Caro was off shift. He wasn’t apologetic about it. Jem was causing a serious drain on their plasma supplies already, he pointed out, and he was still bleeding so intensely that what they did put in him was likely only staying there for a day or less. Going by the figures from Lily’s inventory, in a month they’d be down to just fifteen percent of what had come with them. They’d have to make do with what they had left until the colony was linked up with the Hive and the second ship came in—and that mightn’t be for eighteen months or more.

Pure and simple, it was irresponsible to put so many resources into saving a man who could not be saved.

Jem’s death, then, had been preordained from the moment she arrived for her shift. Doctor Staniforth had recommended, and she had reluctantly agreed, that they no longer act to save Jem’s life. A tough call, but he wasn’t the first and he wouldn’t be the last either. Instead they were to move to a palliative role. For as long as Jem had the strength to cling to life, he would be attended, his pain dulled. Several of the girls had said they’d sit with him if need be—Janna Davis and Barbara Flower, Hannah Thorne and Frances Dunn. Caro herself had taken the first watch.

Jem had been scarcely conscious when she arrived. He acknowledged her sitting next to him with only a slight moan, and spent most of the first hour in sleep. She thought he might never wake, but then suddenly he was lucid.

He’d spoken before. She’d heard him muttering herself, and the others said the same. Emmeline had reported that he was briefly heard counting backwards from ten, and Viola Watling claimed that he was humming an old nursery rhyme while she was in the room. But he had always been lost in his own head, talking not in response to those around him but irrespective of them. In the second hour of her shift, he appeared to finally realise where he was.

“Who are you?” he’d said to her, breaking her out of the daydream she’d fallen into. She hadn’t been quick to reply. He was still in a dream, she thought. But he’d asked again, and she told him who she was and what had happened to him. He was calm enough about the situation, but that didn’t mean he accepted it. He’d laughed and told her that it was impossible. “I’m not hurt,” he’d said, “and even if I was I’d prefer to be at home. I’d like to return to the port now, please.”

“What port?”

“Alfred’s Port. It isn’t far from here.”

Caroline wasn’t a scholar of geography, but she couldn’t remember ever hearing of a place called Alfred’s Port. There certainly wasn’t such a place nearby. But Jem was insistent that it must be—he’d come from there only that morning. The conversation was circular for a time thereafter, him insisting that his hometown was just around the corner, and her explaining that it couldn’t possibly be. The more she denied it, the more certain he became. Eventually he’d become agitated, and the ECG had reported his heart rate with a newfound excitement, and she’d conceded that perhaps she was mistaken. She’d help him go home as soon as he was safe to move. That was a promise. He’d smiled when she said that, and calmed down.

Jem said little else after that. He talked for a minute or two about his favourite berries, before tailing off as if frightened by something. After Caro calmed him down some, he spoke of a red river. A while later, the last time he said anything at all, he started screaming that ‘the wall of shadow’s coming’, and begged his mother to make it stop. Hannah Thorne had been on hand then to ply him with anaesthetic, and he slipped into unconsciousness.

For the next three hours, Caroline had sat on the chair beside his bed, watching. She dared not get up for anything in case he spoke again and she wasn’t there to hear. Hannah came by a few times to check on Jem’s vitals, and she was in the room with Caroline when it ended. By then she knew it was imminent. His face had begun to sink, his skin clammy and jaundiced. That hateful rattling breath had started. The poor man had shat himself too. It was a mercy he wasn’t conscious. The smell was offensive, and it was all she could do to ignore it. She had to. He might wake up while she’d gone to clean up.

The moment of death passed unnoticed when it came. There was no sudden movement, no attempt at a last testament. The monitors kept on beeping. She just sort of noticed that he was gone. It was like a weight had slipped away from the room, as a spirit uncast its shackles. They fell heavy around her neck, and she saw that Jem was breathing no more. She’d pulled the sheets over his face then, and sent Betsy Clanackan to take the body down to the mortuary.

As she left the room, she passed a couple of orderlies come to clean. They smiled at her, all fresh-faced and clean, in neatly-pressed uniforms yet unsoiled by the work of the day. They were well-rested. To be like them, beholden to no need to display their worth, to not be reliant on some waxy tablets to bring sleep...

Caro swallowed her envy and headed for the washroom.

A shower was the order of the day, and it left her feeling cleansed and drowsy. The faint headache that was beginning to become a regular guest was waking up for the day. A sign that she needed to rest. She made the walk home in a tired trance. The corridors were familiar by now, the ivory metal well-trodden. She could make the walk blindfolded.

Being married to the man in charge came with perks, she mused, stepping into the chambers she shared with Chris. The Governor’s Suite was the most luxurious accommodation on the Eia. The walls were finished in gold leaf, the decorative statues commendable alabaster facsimiles of the real arts of the museums. It was very much designed to look like any lordly home. A governor from a common background might well not have noticed the small size, and overlooked the cheap materials with which it had been decorated.

Caroline was from royal stock. She’d been brought up to abhor crude imitations such as this. The veneers were only an inch or two thick. If she dug around, she knew she’d find the hard steel of the Eia underneath. The whole thing was fake.

That’s nothing to worry about, Chris promised; it’s not their forever home, just their cabin for the voyage across the stars. He had big plans for their forever home. She would never be unhappy again, once it was finished. Whenever she tried to look over the plans, he laughed and shut them away. “You’re not to look, Caro, it’s a surprise.”

Six months can go a long way to change a perspective. The Governor’s Suite was her home now, as much as the manor in Borrowood had once been. Cramped as it was, it was still bigger than any other person’s rooms were allowed to be. She’d not liked to say anything when the nurses had moaned about their tiny little quarters barely wide enough to fit a bed.

And the aesthetics had a charm, after a fashion. She’d grown especially fond of the little vignette on the living area’s sideboard, carved in pale wood and painted with clumsy hands. It was a religious scene, the deaths of Ganion and his sister Geia, young warriors who impaled one another with their daggers rather than face the wrath of a malevolent god. The story was a tragedy, but the carving was a farce. Overzealous brush strokes rendered the whole of Geia’s mouth crimson, rather than just her lips. And Ganion’s dagger, thrust between his sister’s legs, resembled less a weapon than an extension of his flesh. It was sacrilege.

Caro and Chris had laughed about it over cups of heady wine.

Chris wasn’t there when she got back. The suite was dark and somehow cold. She turned on a light, and headed for the video screen. It was small, atomically bonded to the wall upon which it stood. Even the god so wroth with Ganion and Geia could not split screen and wall apart. It had been fitted at a janky angle. Not grievously so—it almost looked straight. She’d happened to notice it was askew the other week, while she lay in bed, woken by her night terrors. Since then it had been obvious.

There was a video, the file’s data baked into the screen. Caro’s thirty-sixth year had come while they were still on the long trek through the stars. Armand had recorded a message. She watched it twice to celebrate another year of life, and she’d watched it a dozen times since. Again, tonight, she keyed in the passcode and sat down to watch. It would do her good to see her brother’s face. She took her nightly pills as the screen flickered into life, and grimaced at the bitter taste as Armand’s form appeared.

Like the rest of the family, Armand had the same brown eyes as Auntie Nell, and his hair was closer to a blonde than Caro’s flaming locks. He’d always been clean-shaven before, but on the day he’d recorded the message he was sporting a decent attempt at a beard. It was definitely more full than the patchy effort Chris could muster. He was sat on a balcony with the sun at his back. Behind him, she could see the thick pine forests of Arvila, lit by a milky-white sky. It was mid-afternoon in Demesna, the city far across the stars where her brother was based.

“Caro, I wanted you to see me one last time before you’re gone far away.” Armand always spoke with a grin.

“It’s good to see your face, brother,” said Caroline. “Perhaps I’ll bring you a razor next time we meet.”

His hands went to his face, just as she knew they would, and he scratched at his beard. “You’ll have to excuse the beard. That’s new. Cam’s idea.”

Caro laughed, unheard. “Is Cam your new gentleman friend?”

“Camberin’s her name,” the digital Armand continued. “She showed up as an intern a few months ago, and by Lightness she’s pretty. I’ve already got her as a personal secretary. They make them good around Demesna, these farmer-folk. There’s a siren in their breeding stock, I swear. When you come back from Essegena, I’ll introduce you to her. You’ll love her.”

Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators!

“If she makes you happy, she’s making me happy.” Armand didn’t know she was talking back. He probably wasn’t even awake at the moment—what time was it on Arvila? But she liked to imagine he was hearing her, in spirit at least.

Armand carried on unabated. “But look at me, going on about Cam. All that’ll keep for another time. Look, Caro, I know you’re going to be scared. I also know Chris will take good care of you, and don’t forget you’ll have Ian too. I’m proud of you, little sis. You’ll have the world at your feet next time we meet. I want you to have new friends by then, too—people that aren’t from Borrowood. You hear me? And I want you to tell me all about them.”“

“I miss you, Armand.”

On the screen, Armand turned in his chair and looked at the sky. “If you ever need to be brave, look up at the stars. Look at them, and think of me—and I’ll be looking at them too. So we’ll be together still, see? Anyway, congratulations on turning thirty-six. Have a drink or three, for me.”

“How’s Entessa?” Caro had been estranged from her sister for three years now, but she’d reached out to her when she was given her posting to the Eia, in the hope that they might meet and reconnect before her departure. Tessa had not got back to her.

Armand didn’t answer. Armand never answered, but she still asked the question every damn time. “I love you, Caro,” he said.

“Armand, don’t go.”

But he did. He always did. That was the end of the message. The screen faded to black, Armand’s voice disappeared from the room, and Caro was left alone, grasping desperately for just a few more seconds. “Please, I’ve more to say—” Her words echoed in the silence.

Their last meeting had ended frostily. Caro had gone to Arvila, to the Palace of Demesna, to bid her brother farewell. They’d laughed and cried, hugged a hundred times—and then conversation had turned to their sister. Tessa was older, often aloof, but Caro still felt her absence. But when she’d asked Armand if he knew where Tessa was, her brother’s face had twisted.

“Truth be told, I’ve not heard from dear Tessa for some time now. A few years in fact. She went off to Altaborea—some investigation she was all pepped up on.”

“Why didn’t you say something?”

He shrugged. “Investigations take time. Until recently I assumed she was just deep under cover.”

“You say ‘until recently’?”

“It’s been too long. Tessa’s got more smarts than the two of us combined. Even if it wasn’t safe for her to talk, she’d have got a message out somehow. There’s a search out for her. I’d go myself, but things are getting heated around here.”

Caro bristled. “She’s your flesh and blood. You owe it to her to find out where she’s gone.”

“No more than you do. Caro, she’s a grown woman. She’s capable enough, and if she’s not then Verigut definitely is.”

“Verigut?”

“I’ll only send the best out after my sister.” And had that been a flicker of a smile on his face? It hadn’t lasted.

“Well, couldn’t you go with Verigut? He trusts you well enough. He knows what you can do in a fight. Tessa deserves—”

Armand’s voice raised for the first time. “I have responsibilities, Caro. Things are bad here. Half the farmers want to drive the Unity out of Arvila, and the consequences be damned. Half the township leaders want to scorch the earth as they go. Plester’s wearing himself out stopping the colony from tearing itself up, so if I don’t do his job here then Demesna has no leadership.”

“So let it have no leadership,” said Caro. “Demesna won’t die if you leave the walls of the palace for a little while.”

“It just might.” Armand’s face was grim-set. He looked suddenly tired. Caro couldn’t remember if he’d looked tired before. She didn’t think he had. “You’re in the right place, way out away from it all. This whole galaxy is a shitfight primed to go, and near enough everybody’s going to end up smelling when it does.”

“The Unity has the strength,” she began, not truly believing in what she said. “If they took a hard line, it wouldn’t take a week to get rid of any secessionists.”

“What’s happened to the sister of mine who used to live in your body? Caro, you sound just like Peulion. Has your bleeding heart healed at last?”

She shook her head. “I doubt the people of Arvila want to be the touchpaper for the end of man.”

“If it would get them out from the Unity’s yoke? They’d eat their own young.” Armand leaned close and spoke with a whisper. “Speaking as your brother, I can’t say they’re entirely unreasonable. Plester tries his best, but some of the others are monsters—real sadists, mind. Kidwelly’s up in Ironcoast putting entire farms to the torch because the farmer isn’t producing enough, or the farmer was rude to him, or he doesn’t like the farmer’s name.”

Caro knew Galen Kidwelly by sight, and from the time he’d kissed her in the middle of the Great Hall, on her last visit. She’d taken him for a foppish charmer, not a despot. “If you know about it, why doesn’t Plester stop it?”

“What can Plester do? The leaders won’t vote to remove Kidwelly, and the Commissioners keep delaying.” Armand sighed. “There’s sickness on the east coast, a dozen people missing from near Dichian. It’s not looking good, Caro.”

She’d picked at her hair, and shot a smile his way. “The hard times never last, Armand. The darkest night will end.”

“We’ll speak in the dawn, then. Whenever it comes.” He cocked his head sidewards. “Let me have a good look at you. I’ll want to remember your face. Hey, don’t look so sad—it’ll only be a few years. Then we can talk some more.”

Caro had spoken sadly. “I’m going to miss you, brother. The nightmares are back. I’m worried it’s a sign.”

Armand had laughed faintly. “You and your signs. Caro, dreams are dreams, even the bad ones. Take your tablets if it bothers you.”

He’d never believed her, not like Nana Raine did. But Armand would sit with her, when she was upset. “Even if I can’t understand your emotions, I can’t deny them,” he always told her. “My little sister should be happy.” They couldn’t really talk about her dreams. Armand would get confused in time, and stop seeing the point. But they could talk of other things. Happy things. Caro could lean against her big brother and know that she was protected.

Chris was always cold.

The memory faded to a hollow ghost of Armand’s smile, Armand’s laugh, Armand’s touch—and in the dark, Caro screwed her eyes shut to hold onto him for a moment more. What was she doing? This was her home, this corner of a sprawling ship in the distant reaches of space. She’d given up the manor for this, given up her job and her life. And she felt alone here.

At some point she must have drifted off into sleep. It was a peaceful sleep, unharried by bad dreams; at the very least, she woke up without remembrance of any. Morning had apparently risen. The fresco on the wall had brightened, the glass sun highlighted while the stars had faded to the same dull blue as the sky. Wafting through the open doorway, she smelled food. Something pastry.

Chris had joined her in the night. His side of the bed was empty, but the covers peeled back, and the mattress still dented. He’d evidently risen before her.

She could hear voices coming through the open door, from the living hub of the Governor’s Suite. Who was Chris talking to now?

Her eyes a bleary mess, Caro swung out of the bed and pulled on some clothes. A dress she liked, uncomplicated, easy enough to let fall down over her body and give her modesty for the day. Then she padded out to find her husband.

Chris, she discovered, was sat talking with Ian Fitzhenry, the pair gathered around the low wooden table in the heart of the room. Chris had his back to her, and he didn’t turn when she came in. Ian gave her a courtesy smile and returned to his talk.

“What have you got there?” Creeping up behind Chris, she wrapped her arms around him and gave him a peck on the cheek. He shrugged her off.

“Caroline,” he said, voice even. “I wondered if you were going to wake. You’ve slept more than half the day away.”

“Why, what time is it?” She cast an eye to the timepiece above the suite’s front door. It mocked her as it bore the hour—it was afternoon already. Shit. She was supposed to be working.

“Are you alright?” Ian frowned at her, and pointed at her head. “You’ve got a bit of hair sticking up.”

Licking her hand, she pressed at the offending hair, rubbing it smooth. “You should have woken me.”

Chris looked at her as though she’d asked him to murder his own mother. “I’m sorry, I assumed you were an adult. I’m not your keeper, Caroline, I’m the Governor, or had you forgotten? I don’t have time to wake you up every morning.”

Caro looked to Ian for support. He looked down at the table, rather than meet her gaze.

Of course he did. He was always Chris’ friend, not mine.

“I’ve woken you before,” she said, feeling an anger beginning to build inside her. “I often do, in fact, when you need waking. It only takes a second.”

He batted her away with an irritated wave of the hand. “If you have the time, then good for you. I have important work. I can’t afford to waste even a minute.”

“Important work?” This was turning into one of their rows, she could see that. Well, if there was going to be an argument either way, she might as well get a few good blows in. She channeled that rage she had brewing, aimed it square at Chris. “I work in a bloody hospital. Sod that, I run the hospital. It’s long hours, shit pay, and apparently it’s shit recognition too. So you can take your important work and shove it all the way inside your rectum with all the other crap, where it belongs. I’m missing work because of you.”

Their arguments had a familiar routine. She’d made her point. Now he’d fire back with something only barely related, and she’d do the same, and five minutes later all their stresses were gone and they’d be sat beside each other with their love renewed.

“You’ve been excused from work,” said Chris. “Doctor Caerlin agreed to work a double shift. I sorted that out for you.”

“It would have been quicker just to wake me—”

“People with important jobs make sure they’re awake to do them. That’s part of being an adult.” Chris shoved the remainder of his pastry into his mouth, and stood. “I guess it’s a blessing your womb’s all fucked. You’d have been a disaster of a mother.” He was gone before she felt the tears in her eyes.

She’d not been pregnant since she was twenty. That child, her daughter, hadn’t made it to term. Caro had just long enough to redraw all of her plans, to settle on a name, before that night. It was off-limits as a topic. Chris knew it, just as she did. Her daughter was not to be brought into their arguments. Not ever.

Chris had always respected that before.

She dabbed those tears away as Chris slammed shut the door. She couldn’t cry in front of Ian. He’d barely taken a bite out of his pastry, which he still held in his hand. Flakes had fallen onto the table.

“Here,” he said, offering it to her to take. “You look hungry.”

She gratefully accepted the gift. It lasted for just one bite—she was ravenous, and it was so delectably soft. Crisped brown crumbs caught in her teeth and stuck on her lips.

“You can say something if you want to,” she said, aware that Ian was studiously avoiding her gaze. “We were both here, there’s no use pretending it never happened.”

“He was out of order,” said Ian. “I’d like to bet that he knows it, too.”

“We never fight like this,” she said.

“Bradshaw’s on his case about the bloke the Advanced Party found,” Ian explained. “He’s stressed, and he said something without thinking. We’ve all done it. He’s not a bad person.”

“I used to feel safe around him, because I knew he’d never bring her up. I can’t get that back.”

“You have to ignore him,” said Ian. “He still loves you, Caroline. Perhaps the fire’s not as strong as it used to be, but it’s still there, I promise you. I know what it’s like to fall out of love.”

Of course. Elise. A few years older than Caroline, with a round face upon which a smile was permanently etched, Elise Bainton’s engagement to Ian Fitzhenry had come as a surprise. The pair were civil enough with one another, but they’d never shown signs of being especially close. “I didn’t think Ian knew how to love someone,” Caro remembered saying, when a scrap of embossed card inviting her to their nuptials had arrived with the daily post. Elise wasn’t here. She hadn’t come to Essegena.

“What happened to the two of you? I thought you were happily married.”

Ian shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “The situation changed. I was still a young man when I started seeing Elise. Fit, in my prime, climbing the rungs of the ladder—I could have had any girl I chose. No wonder she took a shine to me. She’s forty now, Caroline. I don’t know if you knew. I threw her a lavish party, gave her the best day of her life, and after it all she just fell asleep. Well, it was like waking up from a ten-year sleep, to find that the world’s moved on and all the doors I wanted to go through had been locked fast in the night. Look at me. I’m middle-aged already, soon I’ll be old. I gave Elise my best years, but our fire’s burnt out, and all that’s left is ash. And the wood was rotten from the first.” He stood suddenly, catching the table with his legs and almost knocking it over. Caro grabbed at the plates to stop them from falling away. “You and Chris, you’re meant to be together. The wood’s not rotten. The fire can be relit. He just needs some time.”

Caro nodded. “He doesn’t deserve it.” But she knew he’d get it. Without Chris she’d be nothing. Have nothing. So what else could she do?