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Jamie hesitated before pushing the front door open.
“Hello?”
Her voice cracked. She swallowed and tried again.
“Mr. Cranwell?” That sounded childishly formal. “Jim?”
The kitchen was tidier than usual. His daughter used to invite her in for a cup of tea sometimes.
“Cathy?”
Even the dishes had been cleared away. An image flared in her head. Cathy, leaning heavily on the kitchen counter, drying cups and stacking them slowly away, refusing to acknowledge the pointlessness of the task. One cupboard door was ajar, with a broken dish nearby. Maybe she’d crawled to her bed, like Jamie had. But Cathy’s bed wouldn’t have been empty. She would have climbed in and wrapped her arms around her children, breathing in their contagion, not knowing any other way of being.
Jamie walked down the hallway to a white-painted door. She stepped into a bright, airy room with doors opening onto the grass behind the house. Dust flecks drifted in the slanting sunlight.
Dust.
The sheets were gray with it, the covers tipped into a tangle on the floor.
There wasn’t much. Not when you thought of the measure of a person.
Three people.
You’d have thought there’d be more heft to a human life.
Jamie stood for a moment, watching the slow play of light and dust, then stepped backward into the corridor and closed the door behind her.
Upstairs, she checked each door until she found a bare-boarded room, furnished with just a bed and a chest of drawers. There was a cross on the wall and a sprawl of abandoned clothes on the floor, topped with Jim Cranwell’s belt, the one his grandchildren had bought him, with the buckle shaped like a running horse.
The covers were drawn up, almost as though the bed had been made, and the pillow was dusted with gray.
Back outside, Jamie leaned against the wall and closed her eyes. There was a pushiness to the sun’s warmth.
Come on, come on. Things to do, things to know.
When she opened her eyes, her gaze fell on one of the cabins down beyond the barn. She stared at it for a moment, and then pushed herself upright and set off across the yard.
Her circuit of the station took longer than it should have. The virus had diminished her. She checked the six cabins, as well as the dorm that housed the younger farmhands. Some were as tidy as the main house, while others bore signs of an occupant who’d done everything they could not to go quietly into the night. But there were no signs of life, and everywhere she went, she saw dust motes drifting in the uncaring sunlight.
When she was done she went back to her own cabin. Her skin felt dry and scuffed, and she found herself rubbing at her palms, as though that dust were clinging to her skin.
Suddenly she was on her knees, folded over, forehead pressed to the floor as though she were praying. Which way did Muslims pray? Toward Mecca. How did they know which way that was, all these millions of miles away?
Her thoughts were twisting tighter and tighter until there was nowhere to go but the place she’d been trying to avoid. She shouldn’t be alive. Somehow the little world had gotten lucky. Was there any realistic chance that its luck had held more than once? And if not...
No.
There were other worlds. There’d be other survivors.
But the statistics were wrong here. What if they were wrong elsewhere? Her thoughts unwound again, spinning out beyond the walls of the cabin, beyond the skies, out into the endlessness of space. An empty universe, with just one pinpoint of life, curled and numb on a dusty floor.
She fought for control. She knew there were survivors. The emergency messages had been clear.
Terminal in almost all cases.
Almost. A lot of life could fit into that one small word.
It all came down to the central worlds. Two thousand survivors. Enough for searches, for rescue missions.
But what if they thought two thousand was enough?
Her hope was strung on elastic, slackening, then snapping tight again.
If no one came, what then? How did it work, being alone, day in, day out?
You wouldn’t speak. There’d be no one to talk to. You wouldn’t touch anyone and no one would touch you. No one would stroke your hair, or tap you on the shoulder and say, Hey, I thought that was you . No sex. No one inside you but you, and yet somehow feeling too full, too crowded, with no room to breathe.
Jamie curled tighter.
Stop.
Her heart was beating a tempo it couldn’t sustain without shaking her apart. And she couldn’t break apart because there was no one to put her back together again. If she broke, then her pieces would blow away on the wind, like the others. Dust to dust and...
Stopstopstopstopstop.
She’d survived. There’d be others. There would.
That thought was a handhold in the shifting swell of panic, tiny and fragile, but just enough for that tight knot inside her to unwind a little.
There’ll be others.
She stayed bent over for a long moment, and only when she was sure her legs would support her did she climb slowly to her feet.
She stripped off her clothes and walked over to the corner cubicle to pull the shower lever. The water was cold, but she closed her eyes and tipped her head back, letting it run over her face and neck, and down the line of the long, pale scar toward her stomach, which still had the faintest suggestion of a swell from her lost pregnancy.
Once she was done, she dressed and went back outside, over to the boundary fence. The horizon was blurred with a slight heat haze, but she could just make out the distant outline of the turbines that served the port. They were still turning, ghost pale against the bleached blue sky.
What if there were other people out there staring at their own empty skies? Each of them trapped in their own lonely skin on their own lonely world? Perhaps they’d take a leap of evolution and learn to send their thoughts across the void.
Hello. I’m here. I’m alone.
Jamie caught herself on the edge of making a sound that could have been a cough of laughter, or a sob, or any number of incoherent things in between.
I need space , she’d told Daniel, ignoring the sour clang of the cliché. She hadn’t just been talking about their relationship. Wherever you went, there were always too many people trying to squeeze into that piece of the world. On Soltaire there’d been room to breathe, with no one pushing her to explain the exact shape and tone of each breath.
Be careful what you wish for.
Perhaps if she wished again, the turbines would falter, then start turning backward, unwinding it all. Someone would say, Oh no, that wasn’t supposed to happen , and they’d take it back.
But the great shadow arms kept turning.
● ● ●
Back inside the cabin Jamie moved around, touching things. Her ancient screen stayed a speckled, dull gray when she pressed the button. No electricity. The generator was down. When she picked up her comm-pager from the bedside table, the battery light was flashing, but there was still enough power to light the screen when she tapped it. One word appeared.
M essage
Her hand jerked so hard that she almost lost her grip on the device. She tightened her fingers around it, and when she unpeeled them again, those blocky letters were still squatting there. When she tapped them with her fingertip, they gave way to a couple of lines of text.
Central Time 15.7.10—18.42
Duration 15 seconds
There followed a long jumble of incomprehensible data, marking the trail of comm satellites that had bounced the message across the void of space.
Her hands were shaking. Fifteenth of July. Less than two days ago. Soltaire was remote. The central worlds had gone silent several days before the virus took hold here.
She touched the screen lightly, as though that might use less power. The pager spat out a crackle of static, which gave way to a high-pitched whine as the message ticker moved across the screen.
....leven twelve thirteen...
Another burst of static, wrapped around something that might have been a human voice, like a faded ghost in the machine.
Then nothing.
She hit the replay button. Again, the seconds counted down, and again, the static flared, carrying with it that tantalizing hint of a voice. Then the pager went dark.
“No. Fuck. ”
She smacked the device with her palm, but the screen stayed blank. Panic scraped at the inside of her ribs. If she could just listen one more time she might be able to figure it out. She might be able to...
Stop.
She drew a deep breath. There’d been nothing there. And it didn’t matter. The simple existence of the message was the point. It had been sent two days ago, long after the disease had completed its rampage through all but the most outlying worlds. Someone else was alive. And in all the vastness of space, she could only think of one person who would be trying to contact her.
Daniel. He was alive.
The room lurched around her.
A memory surfaced. She’d taken him home with her once. It was three years ago, after her father died. She hadn’t wanted to go back for the funeral, but Daniel had pushed and pushed until she gave in and booked them places on one of the fast clippers. It hadn’t been as hard as she’d feared. The service was simple and understated, and she’d managed to hug her stepmother and half sisters and make the right noises, without too much of their shared history gaping between them.
They’d only stayed in Northumberland for a couple of nights, but Daniel had been taken with the place, and they’d been easier together than they had in a long while. On the second evening they’d walked on the long, crescent-shaped beach at Belsley, watching the sun sink beyond the headland. He’d made a comment about it being a reasonable place to sit out a zombie apocalypse—an old joke of theirs—and she’d laughed and agreed.
It’s a plan. He smiled at her. If the world ends, we’ll meet back here. Whoever arrives first can write their name on the sand so the other one knows they’re here.
Okay , she said, but make sure it’s above the tide line. When he kissed her, she leaned into him, thinking that maybe they’d make it after all.
Jamie drew in another ragged breath. He’d been heading to Earth when they’d last spoken. That old promise had been spoken in jest, but he’d remember. He remembered everything. But she was stranded here, with light-years of space between them and no way of crossing it. A sudden rush of vertigo tipped the floor beneath her feet, and she bent over, wrapping her arms across her body, waiting for the world to steady. There had to be a way. She could go to the port. There might be other survivors. There would be.
Other people. A ship. Someone might know how to fly it. Someone could learn. She could learn. They’d get off the planet, head to Earth, to Northumberland, to Daniel.
Her thoughts were tumbling over one another with a buoyancy she didn’t want to examine too closely.
They’d get to Earth and Daniel would be waiting for her. She’d look at him and be sure for the first time. He’d be alive and she’d be alive and that would mean something. It had to mean something.
She looked around the cabin, her pulse beating an urgent tattoo.
Hurry, hurry, hurry.
Her old rucksack was stuffed at the back of the cupboard. It was a tattered canvas thing that had once belonged to her grandfather. Jamie had taken it on school camping trips, along with his heavy, oilskin-backed sea blanket, which was folded in the bottom of the bag now. It had taken up a fair chunk of her baggage allowance when she left Earth, but somehow she couldn’t bring herself to leave it behind. She grabbed the rucksack, stuffing some clothes inside, before heading out of the cabin.
Down in the field the cattle ambled behind her as she opened the three gates that would give them access to the stream and the best grazing. She hesitated over the gates to the bulls’ enclosures but eventually propped them open too.
The station’s battered off-roader was missing from its place behind the barn, and her ID wasn’t logged for any of the other vehicles. She knew there were various ways of circumventing the security systems, but she had no idea where to start with that sort of tinkering. Her gaze fell on the paddocks to the side of the cabin. She couldn’t see the three scrubby cattle ponies, but when she whistled, Conrad lifted his graying head and wandered over to nose at her pocket. The swaybacked roan had endured years of little feet drumming at his sides, and he had an air of world-weary patience. Jamie rubbed his neck, her breath snagging on the sudden lump in her throat.
The cattle, the birds, their presence hadn’t made a dent in her sense of alone . But Conrad was different. She knew him—his name, his quirks and foibles—and seeing him here gave her a pang of emotion that fell somewhere between relief and despair.
Conrad made no objection to being tacked up—beyond a token exhalation that meant she had to set her shoulder against his side and dig him with her elbow to get the girth tightened.
“Sort yourself out.”
He shoved her hard with his head, leaving green-tinged slobber down her side.
Jamie tightened her rucksack across her shoulders and pulled herself into the saddle.
“Come on, then,” she said, clicking her tongue to push him into a rolling plod.
● ● ●
The spaceport was a couple of hours away. Conrad settled into a steady enough pace once he realized he was in it for the duration. Jamie even broke a clunky canter out of him at one point, although she couldn’t persuade him to maintain it. She still had that hurry hurry beating inside her head, but she knew Conrad wouldn’t be hurried. His hoofbeats were hypnotic, and by the time Jamie realized she was counting them, she was already well into the hundreds.
Counting kept the other thoughts at bay. She’d been so sure when she’d set off, but the closer she got to the port, the more that zero point zero zero zero one shouldered its way in. How could she expect to find survivors, with those desperate odds?
It was midafternoon when she arrived. Her mouth was dust-dry, and there was a dull throb at the back of her head. When she’d been here before, the port had been one great clatter of noise from the shipyards and trade depot, but today the stillness was unnerving. At least at Calgarth there’d been a backdrop of sound as the nonhuman world went about its business. But there was no birdsong here, the silence broken only by the scrape of an open door swinging in the breeze.
She dismounted in the square and Conrad wandered over to the scrub of grass in front of the store. He wouldn’t need tethering. Give him a patch of unfamiliar green and he’d be happy for hours, like a gourmand sampling some new fare.
Jamie walked over to the open gate of the shipyard.
The concrete landing site was empty. No ships in port.
It didn’t matter. It didn’t. There could be ships up there, just waiting for a signal from any survivors.
There was a speaker system mounted outside the yard office. She remembered it shrilling on the day of her arrival, loud enough for most of the settlement to hear.
Inside the scruffy little office she found a microphone on the desk, and when she flicked the main switch a red light came on. The electricity was working, then. She felt a lurch of relief. There’d been a nagging fear in the back of her mind that she’d get here to find the power down, and no way of contacting the outside world.
“Hello?” Her voice was thin and uncertain. “If anyone’s here, I’m at the shipyard.” She paused, then added, “My name is Jamie,” as though that might sway some undecided listener. She repeated the message a couple of times, then replaced the microphone before heading back outside and around the corner to the comms station.
When she’d come here after that last mail from Daniel, the portmaster himself had set up the call. She hadn’t watched what he did, not sure she wanted to be there at all. The public booth still smelled the same now: sawdust mixed with a whiff of cleaning fluid. The chipboard walls had holes drilled for wires, and the stool was bolted to the floor. A couple of the fastenings were loose and the seat tipped under her weight as she sat down.
When she flicked the biggest switch, a few lights came on, and something began to click beneath the counter. She tried another switch, and the display flickered with a few darts of static. She turned the tuning dial slowly back and forth in the hope of catching something, but the screen stayed stubbornly dark.
She pressed the microphone button anyway.
“If anyone can hear this, I’m on Soltaire. At the port. My name is Jamie Allenby and I’m a veterinary scientist at Calgarth.”
She paused, conscious of her flat, monotone delivery. But was an impassioned plea for aid any more likely to be answered than a matter-of-fact message? Was it about deserving rescue? Earning it?
She took a deep breath before continuing. “I don’t know if there are any other survivors here. If there’s anyone out there, this is Jamie Allenby at the port on Soltaire.”
It felt like there was more she should be saying, but she didn’t even know if the message was transmitting. She left the console switched on and sat there for a moment, as though there might be an instant reply.
Got your message, be there soon, pip pip, over and out.
She’d sat like this after speaking to Daniel. Well, he’d done most of the talking. But she’d listened, as hard as she could through the static and the lag, for the things that must be there, hidden in the cracks. The things that would mean there was a way back to him.
When she thought of Daniel as a whole, she couldn’t make up her mind if she missed him. But if she broke him down into small, specific things, she felt a little nip of something. The conspiratorial smile he flicked at her when someone they didn’t like said something particularly stupid. The sound of his homecoming routine—shoes carefully removed inside the door, then thrown unceremoniously into the hall cupboard. The way he made toast for her—soft and buttery, and much tastier than when she did it herself.
Shaking the memory away, Jamie turned off the console and walked out of the booth.
● ● ●
Back outside, she looked along the street toward the bar where she’d waited the day she’d arrived. Cranwell had been late, and she’d found a table in the corner, away from the serious business of drinking going on at the bar. She’d surprised herself by ordering a fruit juice. She’d been drinking more since she lost the baby. It dulled the sharp edges of the world, muffling the constant questions and platitudes. She knew the reason well enough, but she hadn’t expected that need to fall away so sharply when she left Alegria.
Now she could feel that old craving tightening around her. The sharp taste of alcohol on her tongue. The slow-creeping haze, blurring sense and memory.
The bar was a scruffy-looking establishment, with peeling window frames and a couple of letters missing from the sign above the door. Inside, it was tidy enough, but there was a layer of dust on the floorboards.
It would be so easy to go around behind the counter, pour a measure of whiskey, and throw it down her throat. But once she started she wouldn’t stop, and there was no one here to pick her up off the floor, no one to get her into bed and hold on to her as the world pitched and spun.
She was suddenly bone-tired. Her whole body felt heavy, and she wanted to slide down onto the floor, close her eyes, and never move again.
The whiskey would help.
No.
With a wrench of will, she turned her back on the bar and headed back outside.
The port was sinking into night, the last dregs of sunlight draining away behind the horizon, and the first pinpoints of starlight just breaking through. Soltaire’s twin moons were facing off across the sky, one a bare sliver, the other swelling close to full. They were always out of sync with one another, one waxing as the other waned. They kept to their own corners of the night sky, never meeting, never reaching a consensus.
The port’s distinctive scent of oil and soldered steel was sinking into the background as the chalky smell of night won out. Funny how the darkness smelled the same everywhere. She could have been anywhere in the universe, anywhere at all.
One of the guesthouses was unlocked, and she found an empty room, made up for someone who’d never arrived. It didn’t feel as intrusive as sleeping in someone’s own bed. There were no remnants of human life here.
No dust.
As soon as she lay down, she felt herself tipping toward sleep. The darkness that rose up to meet her was deep and viscous, and she just had time for a flash of fear and a sharp stab of a thought, before the world slid away.
Alone.