Bounty

• 5 •

Back through the airlock, I embrace the weightlessness. I can’t imagine what Mitch felt when the gravity went off. Even when you’re used to it, when you feel it a dozen times a day, every time I go down to the GWB to get a buzz, there’s that odd sensation of every nerve in my body going from a downward tug to . . . nothing. Like cresting a hill in a speeding car. Or nosing down in atmo. The vertigo is intense if you’re not used to it. For poor Mitch O’Shea, it was his end.

The warthen is twisting and howling in the zero g. I see Scarlett bracing in the corner of the room, a few feet off the floor, taking aim with her blaster.

“Wait!” I shout.

The blanket is hovering above the deck. I gather it on my trajectory toward the ladder. There’s all kinds of debris floating about. My walk suit. Tools. The roll of tape. I send the blanket floating toward Scarlett, and it moves like a wraith through the air. She gathers it. “We just need to get it through the airlock,” I tell her.

She nods. Knows I need this. Knows me well enough. The blaster is holstered. I pull myself up the ladder with my free hand. The pain in my shoulder and ankle are distant, muffled like my hearing from the shock grenade and the explosive blast. The cat is whimpering. Doesn’t seem so ferocious now. Scarlett opens the blanket and kicks off toward the animal, manages to take it from the back. I push off and hit the switch on the ceiling, bracing myself for the fall. There’s a clang as the tools hit the deck, and then a series of oomphs as the three of us follow suit. If my ankle wasn’t broken before, it feels like it now.

Scarlett looks to have landed on the animal, which is lying still. Barely moving. She drags it in a bundle of fabric toward the airlock, wrestles it through. I limp over and key the door. Before it slides shut, I see the warthen extricate itself and dash off into the ship. The fight is out of her. Or maybe without a master to obey, she has no target. Either way, she’s trapped on the ship until I figure out what to do.

I sag against the wall, exhausted. Scarlett tries to catch me. My shoulder screams out. My foot won’t take any weight. Her hands are on me, her face so close, her lips so familiar, my mind still stunned and racing. She starts to say something, starts to thank me, to tell me she loves me, that we can end all wars, that we can make life, have children, move to sector one, be heroes together—

When her eyes widen in pain. And I see inside those windows into her soul, and I see that she is a good person, deep down, just as the life leaves her. Just before her body sags against mine, nothing left to animate it.

Stepping through airlock Charlie is the bounty hunter in black. She has a whisper gun in her hand. It’s pointed right at me. A woman I loved is in my arms, dead. I’m next. I know this with all the certainty of gravity planetside.

The bounty hunter walks to within a pace of me. I’m half pinned under Scarlett’s weight and half pinned by my injuries. I can’t move. I can’t even resist. I’ve wanted to be dead for so long that I open my arms to the concept, to the idea of not existing. I want it. I feel my entire being open up to the cosmos, wanting all of it to pour inside me, for the emptiness to fill me up, to burst me back into the atoms I’m made of, to be the tinsel and debris of that cargo, all scattered through space, unknowing and unfeeling.

The bounty hunter pulls the blaster from Scarlett’s holster and flings it across the module. She grabs Scarlett by the collar and pulls her off me. The woman in black is fiercely strong. She keeps the whisper gun aimed at my head as she drags Scarlett across the deck and through the airlock.

The door closes.

I never heard her come. I barely hear her leave. A light goes from green to red above the door. Scarlett is gone, and I haven’t been arrested, haven’t been killed, and I’m angry as hell. Depressed and angry as hell and full of conviction. Conviction. The missing ingredient. The energy to do it. To finally do it. And nearby, an animal that wants to kill me. So it’s not my weak-ass hands refusing to pull the trigger.

I work my way shakily to my feet. Need to do this before I change my mind. Need to embrace my dark secret, the desire to be ended, the unwhisperable, or they’ll lock you away. I key open the airlock to O’Shea’s ship. “Come and get me!” I shout. The remains of the warthen’s owner are ten paces away. I stumble through the airlock, toward the ship, hoping to be eaten. The animal turns the corner, and I brace for a world of searing pain, of claw and tooth, of white-hot mercy, but I just feel it brush against me. I open my eyes, didn’t realize I’d closed them, and turn to see a tail whisk around the corner. I stumble back into the module, confused. The warthen has a food pack in its mouth. It goes to my walk suit, which is back to a heap on the floor, turns twice in a circle on it, and lies down, chewing on the pack, protein paste going everywhere.

All of this is sensed at a distance. I’m too focused on my dark secret. My new conviction. I hobble toward the other airlock, where Scarlett disappeared. I key open the outer door, step inside the lock, and shut the door behind me. In the tight confines, I think I can smell her. She just passed through here. Was alive moments ago. Now is dead and gone. Her hope has been wiped from the universe.

I wanted to tell her my dark secret. I was so close. More time together, and I would’ve confessed. I would’ve told her how I come here every night before I go to sleep, how I stand in one of these airlocks, how I close the door behind me, and how I think about the vacuum of space on the other side.

Every night, I do this.

Without fail.

There’s an emergency override code that’ll open this door even if there’s no atmo on the other side. It’s for going on space walks. We’re supposed to do one every day. I never have. I only come in here with my suit off. To breathe my last. To end the nightmare.

Leaning against the wall, I enter the first three digits of the override code.

My finger hovers over the fourth.

I’ve done this every day I’ve been here. Every single day. But this time I want it. I can’t go on.

Three numbers sit on the little screen, waiting.

I touch the fourth.

I touch it, but I can’t press it.

I never can.

I sag to the ground, sobbing and broken, hugging my knees.

Bad things come in threes—but then they stop.

And start all over again.