His dreams never varied and tonight was no exception. As soon as he drifted off to sleep, he found himself standing on an infinite expanse of sand. Everywhere he looked he saw shattered stone pillars jutting out of the sand, each lightly obscured by mist.
And then he saw them: two others were here, walking away from him in tandem. One was male, with short, curly grey hair. The other was female, with wavy auburn hair that reached her waist. He called out to them; they did not respond. He ran after them, his long hair flowing out behind him like water as he did, but as soon as he reached them the mist grew thicker, blocking his view of their faces. Find us, a voice whispered into his ear.
He awoke with a start, covered in icy sweat. He never remembered the figures; yet those two words clung to him like honey. "Who do I find?" He murmured to himself. "Who’re you?" The words faded into the background of his life as he got up, dressed, then prepared himself for his next assignment.
Two hours later the starship postings went live. He picked one guarding a researcher; nobody he asked knew who the person was. Something about it to him felt like the right thing to do.
~~~
He looked into a silvered mirror as he clasped his dark hair into a bun, guiding errant strands behind his ear. Then he left his quarters, a rifle strapped to his waist, and proceeded down a corridor to meet his new assignment.
A woman was waiting for him at the corridor’s end. "Hey," she said. "I'm Mia." Her hair was a shock of red that reached her chest. She stuck out her hand to clasp his. "New guard, hmm?" She continued. "What happened to the last one?"
"Murdered," he replied, shaking her hand. "Was on my posting brief. You didn’t know?"
"Oh." She frowned, ever so slightly. “I don’t get out much.”
His gaze hardened. "I'm not so easy to kill." He let go of her hand then glanced back down the corridor, calculating how many intruders could fit into its width.
"Good,” she replied. A door behind her whooshed open though the room inside was dark. The man kept his gaze firmly on the corridor: his job was to guard, not to be curious. She turned around and walked back into the room. Then her voice emanated out of the darkness. "Name?" She asked.
"Liam," he replied.
"Good luck, Liam." With that she was gone, the doors to her research lab shut tight once more. With a sigh, Liam took up a guard stance outside the door.
~~~
The quiet lasted a week before it was shattered by intruders. Liam knew that they were armed though had no idea who they were. But they died just as easily as any human; that he was certain of.
With a muttered curse Liam reloaded his rifle, then aimed it back down the corridor which was already littered with bodies. There were echoes of fighting in the distance as unseen crew engaged unseen assailants. That, however, was beyond Liam’s assignment: his brief had been clear that Mia alone should be guarded. He breathed in, breathed out, then waited. More intruders would arrive. He listened for approaching footsteps.
The door behind him opened with a soft whoosh; Liam did not turn. "Close the door, Mia," Liam snapped, eyes roving over the corridor. "It's not safe."
"You need to get in here," she replied.
"Orders are orders. I’m not moving."
Mia's gaze turned deadly. "This ship was attacked last year,” she said. ”Everyone except me died. Ten seconds before the door’s sealed."
Liam wavered for seven of those seconds then stepped backwards into the room, watching the corridor the entire time. The doors snapped shut; he studied its mechanism with a trained eye. "This is expensive," he muttered. "Could buy ten ships for this thing."
To this, Mia laughed. "I'm worth more than a thousand ships."
Liam turned to face her; his expression was guarded, betraying none of the surprise he felt upon viewing the room’s contents. It was peppered with instruments he didn't recognise, bar a small computer in one corner with an accompanying makeshift bed. In another corner lay a tall bookshelf, stacked to the brim with novels.
Curiosity got the better of Liam’s orders. "What’s all this?" He asked.
"My life's work," she replied. She turned to a large red button near the door and slammed her fist into it. Liam heard sirens, the scraping of metal, then the whooshing of air followed by a piercing scream. All the sounds retreated into an eerie silence outside.
"You opened the airlocks," Liam said, his voice betraying shock. “You killed them all.”
"Yes,” she replied. “It was necessary." She turned back to one of her instruments. "Ship’s protocol. My protocol. If I get attacked, everyone but me dies."
Liam felt dread coil around his stomach. "Then I shouldn't be here,” he said. “Why save me?"
She looked at him for a moment, her expression unreadable, before replying, "I needed a guard. Now I need your help. "
"I'm under orders not to assist-"
"Guess what, Liam? You're the highest ranked officer on the ship now. Fuck your orders."
Liam sighed. He felt a headache coming on. "Fine." He tried not to think about the screams of the dead as he looked round the room once more.
~~~
Helping Mia was simple enough. She had him monitor her for two hours each night; a device wrapped around her wrist fed readings to her computer. Once this was complete Liam slept also, curled up in a makeshift bed in the corner next to the bookshelves.
For three weeks this remained their routine; the door remained sealed and did not open. Liam busied himself with the novels on the bookshelves. He refused to speak to Mia unless necessary and rationalised it as following orders, though deep down he knew that he was afraid of her.
One night, however, his curiosity overcame his fear. He hovered over the computer and watched Mia’s readings appear on the screen. They were unintelligible except for one phrase at the very end: Find us.
Liam blinked twice then backed away from the computer, and when Mia awoke the next day he said nothing about the incident. She, however, found him more amenable to conversation in the following days.
"What's your research about?" He asked her, on a day he felt braver than usual.
"Everything," she replied.
He asked no further.
~~~
"Hold this," Mia asked him out of nowhere, a month after the lab doors had been sealed. He held out his hands; she pressed a small device into them. A wire extended from the device that was connected to a band around her wrist.
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"Press the blue button," she told him.
He did; he yelled in shock as she vanished into thin air. Seconds passed by in silence as he stared at the space she had been in. Ten seconds later, she returned as if she’d never left.
"What the fuck?" He breathed.
"Hmm?" She replied.
"You were gone. You vanished."
"Oh. Good." She removed the band from her wrist then sat down by her computer. "Thanks."
Liam opened his mouth to respond. No words came out; instead he turned to where his sleeping bag lay. "I'm just a guard," he muttered to himself as he sat next to his stack of books. "I'm not supposed to see shit like this."
Mia repeated this process several times over the next day, each time vanishing for longer than she had before. Liam kept his mouth shut; he’d decided he was better off not knowing. Yet more than ever before, two words kept surfacing in his mind as he tried to ignore Mia’s bizarre experiments.
~~~
Six weeks after the lab doors had been sealed, Liam noticed something odd.
"Your hair," He said to Mia, gesturing to the top of her head. "It’s different. It’s growing in brown."
"Oh. I dyed it a while back,” she replied.
Liam couldn't hide the look of surprise on his face. "Dye costs a year's food rations. Why bother?"
"Dunno.” She shrugged. “It felt like the right thing to do."
"Riiiight." Liam settled onto a nest of cushions next to a stack of his favourite books. He picked up one at random.
"Liam?" Mia asked.
"Yeah?"
"Thanks for your help."
"I didn’t have much choice. But you’re welcome, I guess."
That night, Liam dreamed of the pillared landscape for the first time in four months. For the first time, the figures acknowledged his presence, turning to face him as they heard his footsteps; their faces were indistinct.
Find us, they said to him in unison. Find us.
~~~
Three months after the doors were sealed, the ship was boarded by intruders. Mia hit the airlock button over and over and over; yet the men on the other side of the door remained, hammering at it with their fists. Then the sound of a drill started up.
"Fuck!" Liam muttered, grabbing his rifle. "Get back. I'll take out as many as I can."
Above the sound of the drill, Liam heard Mia sprint across the room and slam open a cupboard door.He looked back to see her holding a strange device.
Liam's eyes widened. "Don't leave again," he said. "Please. I hate being here alone."
"I have to. I'm sorry." She looked up at him with sad eyes. "There's no time. If they've found the ship they'll know how to get through the door." She glanced down at the device she'd snatched from the cupboard. Instead of wrapping a band around her wrist, she ripped away the band, looked down at the floor, then stabbed wire into her wrist, wincing at the pain.
Liam turned round then glanced at the roots growing from her scalp. A realisation crashed over him like a tsunami: her hair was auburn.
"Wait!" Liam said.
She glanced up from the device as she pressed a button on its side.
"Find us," Liam said, the panicked words tumbling out of his mouth.
He saw a look of pure shock in her eyes; she opened her mouth to reply then vanished. Seconds later, the doors were forced open, revealing a group of heavily armed men.
"Who the fuck are you?" One of the men snapped, his pistol pointed at Liam.
Liam turned around slowly. "Guard," he replied. "That's all."
"Then you're useless." The man fired four shots into Liam's chest. Liam felt the impacts then the pain blossoming across his chest as he fell backwards. Then he blinked. Suddenly he was standing alone in the room, with the doors wide open to a darkened corridor. There was no trace of the intruders. Liam pressed a hand to his chest to find it whole.
Find us, the voices echoed from every part of the room at once.
Liam felt a surge of panic; he sprinted out of the room into the deserted corridor. He slept in the navigation room on a cot that night, unable to face sleeping in the laboratory with the technology that had stolen Mia away.
~~~
That night he dreamed once more. This time, the pillars on the beach were unbroken and stood twice as tall as him.
"Hey," a voice called behind him. Liam turned around to see Mia, leaning against a nearby pillar with her arms folded.
"You're dead, aren't you?" Liam said. "You never came back."
She shrugged. "Yes and no," she replied.
"Why are you here?"
She looked at him as if he'd told her the sun came out at night. "Because I can be."
He reached for her arm then gasped as he felt flesh and muscle beneath. "You're real,” He said. “That's impossible. This is a dream."
To this she smiled. "Find us," she said. Liam woke up with a start, holding back tears.
~~~
After that night, Liam never dreamed of the pillared landscape again. He kept himself busy on the starship that had become a home like none he’d never had.
One day, he became tired of his hair, which had greyed from the shock of his death undone; he found a set of clippers and shore it all off in a fit of rage. To his surprise it grew back curly.
Two days after that, he re-entered the lab from which he could hear voices whisper to him still, and picked up the lone device Mia had left behind. He took the wires and jabbed it into his wrist.
Find us, the voices shouted into his ears.
"I'm going to," he said, closing his eyes then pressing a button on the device’s side. At once his vision went white; he was thrown backwards over an invisible precipice and fell for what felt like forever.
~~~
He was back in the pillared landscape; this time his dream felt real. He noted that the pillars now stretched into the sky as far as the eye could see. He glanced to his right and noticed Mia standing nearby. Her hair had lost its dye; it was auburn, from the crown of her head to the end at her waist.
"Liam," she said, reaching out a hand. "I've been waiting for you."
He stared at her in shock. "Why did you leave?" He asked.
"I had to. I knew too much."
"Explain." He stepped forwards and clasped her hand.
"The experiments worked," she said, placing a second hand over his. “All of them.”
"I need more details than that, Mia. C’mon. I helped you for months."
Mia shrugged. “Sure. I'm not dead. Neither are you. We're detached from time."
"What?" Liam dropped her hand then stared at her, eyes wide.
"I saved your life, you know," she continued. "When those guys broke through that door. I reached into your timeline and deleted them from existence. Wasn’t that difficult."
Liam shook his head in disbelief. "Then why didn't you come back after?"
"I can't. Not anymore. Neither can you."
There was silence as Liam processed what she had said. "What now, then?" He eventually asked. He had a headache.
"I need your help."
He sighed. "Seriously?"
"Help me drop hints into your timeline," Mia replied. "I gotta make sure you find me."
“Find us, you mean,” Liam said, trying not to smile.
Mia rolled her eyes. “Sure.”
"And after that, Mia?" Liam asked, resigned to his fate in a place he’d once thought was a dream.
Mia smiled. "You'll see."
~~~
His dreams never varied and tonight was no exception. As soon as he drifted off to sleep, he found himself standing on an infinite expanse of sand. Everywhere he looked he saw shattered stone pillars jutting out of the sand, each lightly obscured by mist.
And then he saw them: two others were here, walking away from him in tandem. One was male, with short, curly grey hair. The other was female, with wavy auburn hair that reached her waist. He called out to them; they did not respond. He ran after them, his long hair flowing out behind him like water as he did, but as soon as he reached them the mist grew thicker, blocking his view of their faces. Find us, a voice whispered into his ear.
He awoke with a start.