~ CAROLINE ~
In the dead of night, slick with sweat, Caroline awoke.
She’d had the dream again. It seemed to come more often now, sometimes only a few days apart. The pills had held it at bay. They were beginning to lose their effect, it seemed. Now she was right back to how she had been before. She was only a small girl the first time, lacking the words to describe what she saw. All she’d known then was that it was—somehow—terrifying. As she got older, she began to understand fragments of the dream. The image as a whole still never made sense. All she could say was that it scared her.
Over the years, she’d grown used to it. The scary stories Armand used to tell her stopped being scary when she knew every detail. And the dream stopped being scary when she could recognise every sight, every smell, before it came. For a good few years it hadn’t come to her at all. Five years ago it re-emerged, at first only very rarely. Since they’d left home, it had been growing in frequency, and the more frequent it became, the more it made her uneasy.
It felt like a warning.
When Caro mentioned her fears to her family, they’d told her she was being silly. The Foresleepers are all gone, they said, and they probably couldn’t really tell the future anyway. Dreams don’t have meanings. They aren’t dark portents. She was inclined to agree. She fancied herself a rational woman. She knew what chemical reactions caused the brain to hallucinate.
But then she’d had the dream. It wasn’t at all like the others. Normally, if her nightmares got too frightening, she’d jolt awake. And when she’d had a few minutes to calm down, she’d see it was just her imagination and go back to sleep. Not with the dream. She never woke up from the dream until it was over.
It always happened the same way. All of a sudden, she’d be in the old graveyard on the hill behind her house. One of the headstones was a crooked triquetra, the stone cracked and worn, its inscription long lost to the ages. Though her mind would be screaming at her to run away, she’d always reach out to touch the triquetra. And then it would be there. She wasn’t really sure what it was. In a funny way, it almost resembled a human being. But its limbs were just a little bit too long. And it was always cast in an impenetrable shadow.
And it would beckon her onwards.
There was a house high on the hill, a house so unfathomably ancient that not a single person living in the town it stood over could remember it as anything other than a crumbling ruin. The shadow man led her inside the house, and she was always overcome with sadness. Every item in the house had been loved by somebody once upon a time, and the person who had loved it was long dead. Caro could feel their ghosts, watching her. She never turned to look upon them. The shadow man never let her.
Once, in a rare burst of courage, she’d gone to the house with the others. She’d even been the one to open the door. She’d told herself that the dream was just that, a dream. She’d wildly hoped that seeing what the house really looked like inside would take the fear away from the dream. But as soon as she’d set foot inside, she’d recognised it all. For years in her dreams, she’d seen in complete accuracy the interior of a house she’d never entered before. The carved banisters and the mottled, mold-stained walls, the bust of the one-eyed man above a darkened doorframe, even the skeletal remains of a dead fox nestled at the foot of the staircase.
She’d been sick in the doorway. And then she’d run home without a word of explanation. It was ten years after that before she finally left for medical school, and she never again set foot on the hills behind her house.
Not while she was awake, at least.
The dream continued beyond the house. Caro would follow the shadow man on and on, through a hundred places she didn’t know, all the while feeling the heavy pit in her stomach growing heavier. There was a man bleeding from a hundred wounds, crying through dead eyes for his mother. And then there was the empty watchtower, its insides swept by the wind as the ghost of an ancient king hovered in the air above it, laughing. And there was worse, too: a pregnant woman lying on a bed of nightshade, stabbing herself over and over again; a horse, its coat made of spun silk, ridden by a faceless rider; a field of stars, so many stars she could never count them all, and each one fading to nothing as she looked on.
The images she saw would darken, until she was walking down an empty hallway. It was so narrow, so silent. The odour of oaken beams from a lost century filled the air, filled her nose. She could taste the history. A ring of yellow light surrounded a door at the very end of the hallway. Every time, she knew she didn’t want to see what was on the other side. But she could never help herself. She’d always open the door when she came to it, and she’d always walk through.
And suddenly, it would hit her that the shadow man was no longer leading the way, and she was stood at the bottom of a cenote, with no way out. Water slowly filled the cenote as a million screams deafened her, and then fell silent as the water engulfed her.
But even though she was drowned, she didn’t wake up. She’d float to the surface of the cenote, climbing out onto dry land, and she’d try to cry for help. No matter how hard she cried, she had no voice. And she’d stay there, silently, beside the water, until eventually she woke up.
“You should speak to a dream psychologist,” Chris had told her, when she’d told him every detail of the dreams. So she did. And the dream psychologist told her she was going mad, and put her on a regimen of pills. Eight a day, none of which had any effect, but there was the signature of a medical professional on the receipt, and as far as Chris was concerned that made the pills necessary. They’d argued once, when Caro pointed out that she was a medical professional, and she didn’t think the pills were doing her any good. But as Chris said, her specialty was in infections and diseases, not in neurology.
They hadn’t argued again. It wasn’t worth the trouble. His help, misguided as it was, had been borne out of love for her, and she was being resolute in ignoring his kindness. That wasn’t fair. She took the pills every day, and tried to pretend that she wasn’t sleepwalking to her own eventual death by apathy.
As she woke up in the small hours of the morning, drenched in sweat, knowing that there was no chance of her getting back to sleep, she found herself wondering why she kept at it.
Caro looked around the room. In the darkness, she could see nothing more than the outline of Chris, asleep beside her. His snores rang out in all corners of the room. Somehow, he’d spread out to cover three quarters of the bed. By break of day, he’d probably cover all of it.
For a week, she’d made him sleep on the sofa. He’d begged her forgiveness, apologised for daring to talk about her baby girl, and made a show of his love for her. He’d even cooked for her, a gourmet platter of tomatoes and celery with a sweet garnish. In the end, she’d relented and allowed her husband to return to the marital bed—but she’d been sure he understood that there were no more chances. Next time, it was over.
Caro swung her feet out of the bed. The metal floor felt like ice, but she stood up nonetheless. She wandered to the adjoining bathroom, picking up a uniform on her way. If she was going to be awake anyway, she might as well get some work done. After the lad Jem had died, they’d realised that there was no coroner in the colony. She’d volunteered to do an autopsy on his body, to find out what she could. Now was as good a time as any to work on that.
The pills were in her hand, she noticed. “CAROLINE BALLARD,” the label read. And underneath, in a smaller text, “care of Chris Ballard”.
Care of?
She squeezed her hand into a fist, cracking the tinted plastic of the pill bottle. And then she poured them all away—every last tablet—and flushed them out of sight.
If Chris wanted to complain, he’d have to argue with her.
The ship was unsettling in its silence. Caro had done her share of night shifts on the long journey here, but things had been different then. There were so many systems that needed constant attention, so more people were up and working. All the lights were kept on then, and the hum of the engines never stopped.
It was dark now. Not completely—the dim emergency lights on the ceilings couldn’t be turned off as long as they had power—but enough to make the air feel dead. A musty smell had settled throughout, permeating. The stale sweat of six thousand men and women.
Rounding a corner, she could feel a lump beginning to form in her throat. These corridors were just like the long hallway from her dream. The one the shadow man had led her down. She hadn’t noticed it before, not when it was fully lit. But in the dark it was unmistakeable. This was the hallway she’d dreamt of.
She was beginning to believe in premonition.
There were other people awake. She knew that. The hospital alone had a dozen or so staff every night. And some of the most essential systems—the ship’s life support, for instance—needed someone to work them, even if just to watch a computer all night and restart it if it crashed. But those few night owls were all at their posts. Caro was nearly at the hospital before she saw another soul.
The man was well-concealed in a little alcove at the side of the hallway. Hidden by the shadows that filled the corridor, he might have gone unnoticed had he not moved from his spot. He ran out into the middle of the corridor, colliding with Caro and almost knocking her over.
“How is it you’ve come to be awake at this hour?” Caro’s question seemed to startle the man, who looked at her with wide eyes. His hair was a mess of long curls, and his face looked as though it hadn’t seen a razor blade in weeks. He was well overdue a trip to the barbershop. Tobacco stained his fingers, and the red stain of vilsa leaf made his teeth look like bloody masses in his mouth. Caro gagged at the smell, and held her breath.
He grunted something unintelligible and tried to push past, but Caro put a hand on his shoulder. He swung his arm out, catching her on the side of the head. She lost her balance and stumbled, but she was still holding on to the man. Rather than having the chance to make his getaway, he was pulled over and fell to the floor himself.
This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.
Caro stood over him. “I wouldn’t try that again, not unless you want a criminal record already.”
“You hit me first,” the man grunted. “Let me go. I’m working.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Is that right? What is your job then, that you’re up at this hour?”
He glared at her. “Night guard. I watch the tapes.” It made sense. Night guards weren’t, strictly speaking, required to go and investigate anything they saw, provided they reported it. But it wasn’t out of their remit. He could very well have seen something here, a suspicious character perhaps, and come to check it out for himself. She had a feeling that wasn’t the case.
“And what brings you to the hospital?”
The man had no answer. He looked at her through beady little eyes, and spat on the ground. “I know you,” he said. “Mistress Ballard. You think you can do what you like just because you’re fucking the Governor. The walls are closing in, Foresleeper. One of these days someone’ll poke you till you bleed out, and ain’t nobody going to be mourning you.” He pulled himself to his feet and strode into the darkness. She watched him until he’d disappeared around the corner.
Prendergast had sworn not to tell a soul. The twat! She should have known that he wasn’t to be trusted.
A faintly-lit sign on the wall revealed her present location, somewhere not altogether far from the nurses’ quarters. In the early days, while the Eia was still on the other side of the Dead Zone, she’d followed a couple of the nurses there. They’d spent much of their shift having a great joke, her and Lily Day and Callie Huston and some others besides, and the chatter had continued after they’d clocked off. It had continued until they came to the door leading to the nurses’ quarters, when Huston had pulled a face. “This is the nurses’ quarters,” she’d said, pointedly, and Mary Ellen Tolcross had told her they didn’t want any of the nurses to feel like they didn’t have a safe space to vent their feelings about the senior staff. They’d claimed it was nothing personal. As far as Caro was concerned, that was irrelevant. Once again she was shut out, and the great sisterhood of her peers was closed to her.
Always she was the well-loved boss, praise lavished on her, but nobody wanted to be friends with the boss.
She was closer to the hospital than she’d realised, close enough in fact that the man could probably have listened in on any conversations. There were none to be had. With Jem dead, the hospital’s workload was limited to workplace injuries and minor ailments. When she’d left at the end of her previous shift, there had been no patients at all. The result was a quiet hospital, the night staff trying to find ways to entertain themselves. As she entered, she saw one of the orderlies sat behind the reception desk, reading a book by the light of a small lamp.
“Keeping busy, I see,” she called. The poor girl hadn’t heard her coming in, and jumped so suddenly she almost fell out of her chair.
“Doctor Ballard,” she said. “I didn’t see you.”
Caro laughed. “I guessed as much. Sorry, Cherry, I didn’t mean to scare you.”
Cherry shook her head. “I should have been paying more attention, Doctor Ballard. It’s not right to be reading on the job.”
Caro looked around the hospital. There were supposed to be twelve of them on shift at the moment, but other than Cherry she could see none. “Where are the others?”
“In the break room. Some of them are sleeping, I think,” Cherry explained. Her face had paled, but Caro wasn’t too bothered. Strictly speaking they were supposed to be awake for their whole shifts, but as long as there were no patients to be cared for and all the paperwork was completed by the end of the shift she didn’t mind what they did. And night shifts felt twice as long as they really were, even when there was real work to do. She couldn’t begrudge anyone sleeping to stave off the boredom.
“It’s early, Doctor Ballard,” Cherry said. “You aren’t due here for another three hours.”
“I have some work I have to do. Who’s in charge of this shift? Is it Doctor Maynard?”
Cherry glanced down at a sheet of paper on the desk in front of her. “No, Ma’am, it’s Doctor Staniforth.”
“Where might I find him?”
“He’s asleep in the break room, Doctor Ballard.”
Caro laughed. Of course he was. She debated going to find him, but decided against it. “When he appears, tell him he’ll find me in the mortuary.”
Cherry nodded. “Yes, Ma’am.”
Hidden out of sight behind the grand staircase that was the centrepiece of the hospital, the mortuary was the coldest part, kept at a permanently chilly temperature to stop bodies decaying before they could be examined. Owing to the lack of dead people, and indeed the fact that those who’d travelled aboard the Eia were by and large healthy people in their prime—and thus not at an especially high risk of death—the corridors and rooms of the mortuary had gained a second purpose as cold storage.
There was an actual cold storage, but it was three times further from the main wards than the mortuary was, and two stories up. None of the nurses could be hassled to wheel trolleys laden with supplies all that way. It was a lot easier just to dump things in the cadaver-corner. The autopsy rooms were lined with bottles of climate-sensitive medicine.
It was dark as Caro entered. There was a delay of about two seconds after the switch was pressed before the lights came on, ample time for her to take in all of the odd shadows and turn them into horrors in her mind. She’d never been a fan of mortuaries.
Jem’s body had been taken to Autopsy Room A, the first and biggest, according to the file Doctor Maynard had filled out. Handily, the door to Autopsy Room A was directly adjacent to the outer door of the mortuary. She pushed it open to find one of the nurses standing over the corpse. With thick black hair braided tightly down her back, all kept beneath a felt cloche, Viola Watling was immediately recognisable. The door shut heavily behind Caro, and Viola jumped at the noise.
“Viola? I didn’t expect there to be anybody here.”
“Doctor Staniforth told me to prepare the tools.” Viola held up a small knife that was clasped in her hand. “Sorry, Doctor Ballard, I got sidetracked. He’s the same age as my brother. It’s hard not to imagine Sam lying there.”
Something like a smile flashed across Caro’s face—a sympathetic smile, she hoped. “You shouldn’t dwell on stuff like that.”
Viola shook her head. “If I look at him right, I can see Sam’s face. It’s comforting. I know it shouldn’t be, but... it reminds me of home. Am I weird?”
“Yes.”
Viola looked crestfallen. That hadn’t been the intention.
Caro fumbled for more to say. “That doesn’t have to be a bad thing, though. We’re all weird in our own ways. I put mustard on my scones.”
The girl giggled. “That’s vile.”
“Don’t knock it. You’d be surprised.”
Viola offered the knife to Caro. “I should get back to the ward,” she said. “Or Staniforth will have my hide.”
“He’ll have your hide for forgetting his titles, if anything,” Caro laughed, taking the knife from Viola. “Anyway, I’m in charge here. Have you ever done an autopsy before, Viola?”
“Once. In a simulation.”
“Stay. Watch. It’ll be good for you.”
Having an extra pair of hands was a useful boon. Viola took a position just behind Caro, close enough to hand her a piece of equipment if need be but far enough away that she wouldn’t get taken by a stray elbow.
Caro looked at the face before her. When he was alive, she hadn’t realised how young he was. If her daughter had lived, she’d be a similar age. A lump caught in her throat. She’d put that girl out of her mind, never thought of her if she could help it. No good ever came of it. She swallowed hard, and determined not to think about her now—not until the end of the shift, at least.
As she made the first incision, a thin line of blood bubbled out. Viola gasped. “Don’t worry,” said Caro. “It’s perfectly normal.”
“It’s just... the blood...”
“It’s an autopsy, Miss Watling. What were you expecting?” It took a special sort of idiot to go into medicine yet be surprised by blood. She’d known Viola in passing for some years before the Eia—her eldest brother Terry had been at medical school at the same time as Caro, though he’d failed out after the first year. She was only a child at the time, but to Caro’s eyes Viola had always seemed studious and smart.
Looks, apparently, could be very deceiving.
She looked once more at the body on the gurney before her. The skin was covered with half-dry blood; lakes of gleaming, sticky claret pockmarked his face and chest. It was a wonder he’d lived for as long as he had. There wasn’t really any need for an autopsy. You wouldn’t look at a flayed man and wonder how he died—and these wounds, while not quite as severe, had had the same effect.
She was suddenly tired again. Bed was such an inviting prospect. It would be so nice to give herself over to the warm eider, to stretch out her legs and drift off for an hour or seven. She could bin this all off and go back to sleep. Who would tell her off? The Lord Physician? He was eighty years old, half blind, and a dozen light years away on his ivory chair. Chris? If he had anything to say, it would be quietly, behind closed doors. Image was too important to him.
Viola yawned. Dammit. Now she had to carry on, or she’d seem like a soft touch. “Is this boring you?”
“No, Doctor. Of course not.”
“Aren’t you lucky? It’s boring me.” She made another cut, and peeled back a tiny square of skin. “It’s gruesome and it’s boring. Jobs aren’t meant to be fun.”
That was true, wasn’t it? Nobody woke up in the morning excited to spend their day labouring away, surely. It was just something that had to be done. Chris liked to say that she’d be a queen one day. That was her bloodright, just as Nana Raine always said it was, and she’d be able to enjoy the highest luxuries of life without lifting a finger she didn’t want to. She’d live forever in the pages of history. But a good queen had to make hard decisions, and keep all of her subjects happy, and provide heirs for her king. How was that any different from work? It certainly didn’t sound fun. And she definitely didn’t want to live forever. Eternity was a long time. She’d get bored.
Tessa probably had it figured out. She’d been the first to realise that work was a bitch. “One day,” she’d said, at family dinner, “I’ll have enough money to disappear. I’ll go around the universe, see all the sights, do what I want to do, and not have to worry about what anybody else thinks.” And sure enough she’d done just that. It had been years since anyone had heard from Tessa. Perhaps nothing bad had happened. Tessa was probably living in peace by one of Altaborea’s azure beaches, no doubt living with the daughter of some innkeeper whose establishment she’d stayed at, enjoying the dream life she’d talked about.
For a moment, Caro wished she could take her sister’s place.
A shrill squeal distracted her. “Doctor. I think he’s still alive.”
She looked at Viola in disbelief. How had this woman got a job as a nurse? “Don’t be absurd, Miss Watling, I saw him die myself. You’ve been here for who knows how long, you know he’s cold.”
“I know. But the blood.”
“Dead people have blood too.”
“It was moving,” said Viola.
“Liquids often do, when there’s gravity.”
She tried to go back to the daydream, but the moment had gone. With it, her memory of what exactly she was doing. She was performing an autopsy, but she’d been in the middle of an action and for the life of her she couldn’t remember what it was. She turned the knife in her hand as she tried to think.
“You must have seen that, Doctor!” This time, Viola’s cry was right in Caro’s ear. She winced bodily, and wondered if her eardrum had been perforated. It didn’t hurt, so she was probably in the clear—a turn of luck.
But she could see what Viola had seen. A tiny rivulet of blood had run down Jem’s stomach from the incision, and the bead had settled just above his belly button. Well, she said settled, but it wasn’t still. It seemed to be dancing, like jelly that had been introduced to a catchy beat.
“Uh... Viola, can you pass me a magnifying glass?”
“Here you go.” Viola pressed an ivory handle into Caro’s hand.
She held it over the dancing blood. It didn’t have nearly the magnification of a microscope, but it was more immediately accessible. And it was enough. There was something in the blood, some sort of particle. Crumbs of black seemed to be held in place by the tension of the fluid. She’d never seen blood like it.
“Viola, sweet, be a doll and run to the reception. Tell Cherry to call the Governor.” Chris had to see this.