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Three days passed in a tangle of fear and loneliness, broken by the occasional lighthouse-beacon flash of hope.
Jamie tried to find a routine to stop herself from getting lost in the endless hours. She ate her breakfast at one of the tables in the dining room, everything laid out just so. After washing up she’d head out to the square where Conrad was steadily working the grass down to stubble. She’d linger over the task of grooming him, and then she’d saddle up and ride out.
She drew mental trajectories around the port, mapping out the space around her, just as she mapped out the hours. At every settlement and smallholding, she’d stop to check for signs of life, but everywhere she went she saw the slow, empty drift of the dust.
In the evening she walked through the streets of the port, feeling the tug of temptation every time she passed the bar. By the third night she no longer had the energy to resist.
Inside, she found a bottle of whiskey and a glass and made her way to a table next to one of the windows.
The whiskey sounded a familiar note. It had been her drink of choice after the baby. It was an efficient drink; short and sharp and to the point. She and Daniel had already been fighting about her refusal to discuss the baby. Then they fought about her drinking and her refusal to discuss the baby. He’d laughed once, leaning on the kitchen counter, fingers spread as though he’d been stretched beyond any hope of snapping back. Most people talk too much when they’re drunk. You shut down even more. He rubbed his hand across his eyes. It was my baby too.
She took a deep gulp of whiskey, swirling the liquid around the glass before the second mouthful. The sun was setting, the window just starting to turn opaque. Her reflection looked back at her. She’d never carried much extra weight, but her slightness had always had a strength to it. Now she looked fragile. Her olive complexion didn’t suit pallor. She was drawn and sallow, her face all shadows and hollows.
Zero point zero zero zero one.
At that moment she believed it. She felt like a fragment of a person.
Something shifted behind her reflection.
At first she thought she was mistaken, that it had just been the glass catching her movement, mocking it back to her. But as she leaned closer, her reflection fell away, and the street came into focus.
A man. A woman. Walking toward the bar.
The glass skittered across the table as Jamie’s hand lurched. The man was pointing toward the window. The woman followed the line of his gesture, shielding her eyes with her hand.
A surge of adrenaline took Jamie to her feet, her chair crashing to the floor. Her heart was hurling itself against her ribs as the door creaked open and the man stepped into the bar. He was small statured, in his late sixties or thereabouts, his white hair peppered with remnants of an earlier steel gray. He wore a loose, collarless tunic over cotton trousers. The woman behind him was younger, early fifties perhaps, thin and gaunt with eyes a sharp enough blue to be striking, even from a few meters away. Her hands were tucked under her armpits, as though she had to hold herself together.
Jamie felt an incongruous surge of triumph, as though she’d beaten some unseen opponent in a complex game of chance.
The statistics were wrong.
The corners of the man’s mouth lifted in a cautious smile.
“Hello.”
Jamie tried to reply, but something caught in her throat. She coughed and scrubbed at her face with the back of her hand.
“I’m sorry.” She tugged her sleeve up to wipe the tears from her other cheek. “I thought...”
The man crossed the room and took her hand. There was something cool and reassuring about his grip. He didn’t hold on too tight, or lean in too close. It was just a touch, just a simple I’m here, we’re here, we made it .
She breathed in hard. “I’m sorry. I’m okay.”
The woman walked over to join them, moving with a jerky, hesitant gait that made her look as though her knees weren’t jointed properly.
“This is Rena,” the man said. “I’m Lowry.”
“Jamie.”
“Jamie,” he repeated. “Are you from here?” A brief smile twitched at his lips. “The settlement, I mean. Not the bar.”
That smile scraped against her emotions, trailing a scratch behind it. How could he be standing there, all smiles and casual introductions, as though they’d met at some party? But there were two of them. They hadn’t had to work their way through the full horror of being alone, maybe the last one alive.
“I was working,” she said. “Out at Calgarth.”
“From the capital, originally?” Lowry tilted his head. “That’s not a local accent.”
“I lived on Alegria for a few years.” Jamie felt a squirm of discomfort at the idea that her life was marked out in the way she spoke. It wasn’t even an accent. It was what was left when you stripped accent and dialect away, leaving neutral vowels and measured beats. It wasn’t the way she’d spoken when she was young. One day she’d woken up and realized she sounded like everyone else around her. She’d felt a little stab of guilt, and it was the memory of that feeling that made her add now, “But I was born on Earth.”
“Long way from Earth,” Lowry said.
“Yes.”
A pause. Jamie reached about for something to break the silence.
“What about you?” The usual courtesies felt brittle and irrelevant. There were more important things to say, surely. Who were they? What did they want from her?
What did she want from them?
But they seemed to be stuck in some social holding pattern: all polite introductions and mundane questions.
“We’re from Longvale,” Lowry said. “Out near the Lhun valley.”
“The monastery.” She’d heard the farmhands joking about what the holy men must get up to alone out there.
Lowry smiled. “No monks. Just a few people in need of a bit of space from the world.”
“Are you...” She didn’t know anything about Longvale beyond the jokes and speculation.
“I’m a preacher.” Lowry correctly interpreted her uncertainty. “I travel a fair bit, but I come back every few months. I was on retreat when the virus hit. Like Rena here.”
“Was it just two of you?”
Lowry shook his head. “There were others.” He looked away, his gaze falling on the whiskey. A faint smile twisted his lips. “Is that for sharing?”
“It could be.” Jamie couldn’t find a smile of her own for the idea of the three of them sitting together, drowning their sorrows. But she could have been drinking alone, drinking until she could drink no more.
She went to the bar for two more tumblers while Lowry and Rena sat down at the table. When she pushed the bottle toward him, Lowry poured a generous measure into each glass.
“There should be a toast.” There was a wry twist to his lips again. “To the human race? Still here despite it all?”
Jamie looked down at her glass. She didn’t want to be the human race. It sounded too big a responsibility. She hadn’t even been able to keep one tiny not-quite person alive inside her.
“To salvation.” Rena’s voice was lower than Jamie had expected from someone of her sparse frame. She was rubbing at her glass with her thumb, a frown furrowed between her brows.
“To salvation, then.” Lowry took a cautious sip, grimacing as the drink hit the back of his throat. “An acquired taste, whiskey. And I never seem to be around it long enough to do the necessary acquiring.”
“Don’t clergymen abstain?” Jamie said.
Lowry grinned. “Most do. Every religion seems to have something that’s apparently the root of humanity’s troubles. Whether it’s wine, women, or song, if they were all right, there’d be nothing left we could touch without damnation.”
“What church do you belong to?” Jamie asked.
“No particular denomination. Longvale has something of an open-door policy.”
There was something bitingly unreal about the situation. Drinking whiskey and talking about faith in an empty bar on an empty planet.
“So what do you do?” Lowry asked.
“I’m a vet,” Jamie said. They were all clinging to the present tense. “I was working with the breeding stock at Calgarth.”
“I’ve heard of it.” Lowry hesitated before asking the inevitable question. “Any others?”
When Jamie shook her head, he pressed his lips together, dipping his chin, as though offering a silent prayer.
Jamie had never been religious, but she’d spent a few of her formative years at a Catholic school. Her mother’s faith came and went in broken bursts, but she’d cared enough to fight her ex-husband over Jamie’s schooling. Or maybe it was just the fight she cared about. Lowry seemed very different from her school’s dogmatic visiting priests. He had a calm and easy manner that was apparent, even at a first meeting as fraught and unreal as this one.
She glanced at Rena. There was a fidgety intensity about the older woman. Her hands shifted constantly on her glass, occasionally going up to tug at some stray strand of graying hair, or to the corner of her mouth so that she could chew on the edge of a blunted nail.
Rena looked up suddenly, catching her staring. Jamie stumbled into a clumsy question. “What about you? What do you do?”
The other woman started to put her glass down, then seemed to change her mind, her fingers tightening around it. “I was a research scientist. On Alegria. I was... I left.” She stopped abruptly, lifting her chin to give Jamie a look with a hint of challenge in it. “Why are you here?” Her gaze flickered. “I mean... all the way out here in the colonies.”
“A bit of space.” Jamie glanced at Lowry. “Like you said.”
“Plenty of that out here.” Lowry hesitated. “Have you lost anyone?”
The moment stretched out. “Yes,” Jamie said, and then felt guilty because it wasn’t true. Not in the way he’d meant. Her baby had been gone long before everyone else, but it didn’t seem right to tell them that. There were too few of them to start diversifying their tragedies. And it didn’t matter. He was still gone.
There was a stark intimacy to the scene: the empty bar, and the three of them huddled around the little table, with the darkness pressing against the window.
“What was your job on the capital?” Lowry changed the subject. “Not many cows on Alegria.”
“Research.” She glanced at Rena, with the faint thought of drawing her into the conversation, but the other woman was looking at Jamie’s left hand, where her travel ID circled her ring finger.
“That’s an upper-echelon mark,” she said. “Why would you need to come out here for a job?”
Jamie dropped her hand to her lap. She hated the way people always looked for your mark when they first met you. Sometimes it was just a quick flick of a glance, buried in the middle of the conversation. Sometimes it was more blatant. It was an indelible marker of what your life meant to everyone else.
And more than that. It was a reminder of all those protests and lost causes from Jamie’s youth on Earth. She’d done all the right things. She’d joined the campaigns against the resurrection of the old forced emigration programs. She’d been in the marches, protested against the casual ousting of whole communities from the planet just because they’d suddenly been deemed undesirable in the greater scheme of things. When she’d left Earth it had been on one of the protest ships. If they have to go, then we go too ; that had been their tagline. And then the measures had been forced through anyway. First the emigration programs, then the mandatory ID marking, and somehow she’d found herself turning up to register, the same as everyone else.
She’d seen a couple of other old protesters at the ID office, and they’d avoided one another’s eyes, concentrating on their forms. No one in authority ever admitted that the data on those forms was used to sift the population into groups, and there was no acknowledgment that the placement of the ID mark had any meaning. But everyone knew. After the procedure, the sting of the lasering process already fading, Jamie felt as though a piece of her had been scuffed away. It was official. She was part of the upper echelon, a member of the strata of society that had forced people from their homes and burned their value into their skin.
Rena was rubbing the edge of her shirt between the fingers of her left hand, her own upper-echelon mark visible. Lowry’s was in the same place, a little worn, but functional enough.
“We were on retreat,” Rena said, defensively, when she saw where Jamie was looking.
“And I was on a cattle station.” Jamie couldn’t keep the sharp edge out of her voice, and Rena shifted in her seat, her frown deepening.
Jamie turned back to Lowry. “How long were you at Longvale before the virus?”
“A couple of months,” he said. “Rena only came in, what, a month ago?”
“Five weeks.”
“That long?” Lowry said. “I suppose it was. You got in about a week after we spoke on the long-range.”
“You knew one another before?” Jamie said.
“We worked at the same hospital a few years ago.” Jamie noticed that Lowry glanced at Rena before answering. “I was the visiting priest.”
“You’re Catholic?”
“I was. I’m a little less strict these days.”
Rena made a sharp gesture. “All beliefs come back to the one God. It’s all the same in the end.”
“The end?” Jamie felt a kick of blurred and offbeat anger. “We seem to be there. But I’m not seeing trumpets and the gates of heaven opening up.”
Rena glared at Jamie, and Lowry put his hand on her arm.
“There are different types of salvation,” he said, diplomatically.
“No.” Rena shook him off. “There’s only one. In the voice of God, speaking through the space between the stars.”
The words had the resonance of a prayer, and Jamie almost expected Lowry to dip his head and say Amen . How had they moved so swiftly from What do you do? to What do you believe?
Rena looked down, a tear glistening on her cheek, and Jamie felt a pang of something that might have been guilt. Just three of them here, and she still couldn’t find a gentle word for another broken soul.
She looked around the bar, feeling for a change of subject. “Do you think it’s like this everywhere?” Something was nagging at her. Something about the statistics. “It’s odd,” she went on, slowly. “Most pathogens want to survive.”
“Want?” Rena interrupted, her tone suddenly brusque. “They don’t want. They just are. You’re a scientist. You know that.”
“Want,” Jamie said. “Need. Everything pushes toward life. What’s the point of a parasite that destroys its host?”
“That’s what viruses do,” Rena said. “They kill.”
“But most don’t burn their host away to nothing.”
“Things happen.” Rena was fidgeting again, tugging at her cuff. “Sometimes things go wrong.”
Silence settled over the table once again. It was Lowry who broke it, turning to Rena. “Do you think we should check the signal?”
“I set an alert. If anyone answers we’ll hear it over the speakers.”
“An alert?” Jamie said.
“We set up a distress signal,” Lowry said. “It goes off every three minutes. If anyone comes within range they should pick it up.”
“The system was turned off.”
Rena shook her head. “Not in the booth. The main unit in the office. The public system hasn’t got the power to reach farther than the first relay.” She was brisker, more focused when she talked about practical things.
“Do you think there’s anyone out there?” Jamie said.
“We listened on the airwaves for a while,” Lowry said. “There were some traces. Nothing close, but it sounded like people trying to get through to someone.”
“People will come.” Rena pressed her palms together, like a child saying her prayers. “Then it will begin.”
“What will?” Jamie said.
“The new world.” Rena looked surprised that Jamie had to ask. “We’ll start again. Build something better.” Certainty blazed briefly on her face, then faded, leaving her looking lost and unsure. “We’ll start again,” she repeated. “That’s what God wants us to do.”
It sounded so simple. The world they’d known, over and done. Time to start again, and get it right this time. There was an attraction to the idea, like a book of fairy tales, with every The End followed by a turn of the page and another Once upon a time .
But even if there were other survivors, there were vast swaths of empty space between them. What if the three of them had to find a way to start again right here?
It felt like all that space was contracting around her, the emptiness of it pressing close like a second skin.
“Hey.” Lowry touched her arm. “It’s all right.”
She shook her head, wrapping her arms tightly across her body. Her breath was growing shorter, more labored.
“Jamie?” Lowry’s voice sounded farther away.
She couldn’t feel her fingers. She couldn’t feel anything. Perhaps she wasn’t here at all. Perhaps she was still lying in those musty sheets out at Calgarth, wandering the tangled paths of her final, failing dreams.
“Jamie.” Lowry reached for her shoulder. Somehow she shoved herself back from the table, her chair scraping on the floor. It was vitally important that he didn’t touch her, although she couldn’t work out why. Her thoughts were splintering. Lowry’s voice stretched out, vanishing into a rush of white noise, like water or static. Her last coherent thought was that he’d never been there at all, that the math had been right all along.
Zero point zero zero zero one.