Leviathan Falls

Chapter Forty-Four: Teresa

From the moment they entered the station, Teresa had been watching James Holden die.

She’d known something was wrong with him as soon as she’d gotten to the rendezvous. She’d been around him for years, first in the State Building on Laconia, where he’d been a figure of danger and subtle threat. Then on his ship, where he’d become something smaller, gentler, and more fragile. She knew his moods, the way he used humor to cover over the darkness that haunted him, the vulnerability he carried with him, and the strength. She was fairly certain he didn’t know that about her, and that was fine.

He had never reminded her of her father, though. Not until now.

She didn’t put her finger on it. Not at first. She struggled with her own intrusive thoughts. The boy’s voice that seemed to be just behind her speaking in a language she didn’t know but understood anyway. The eerie, almost choral voice encouraging her to let her sense of self go. The woman who had given a child up for adoption and now was torn between guilt and relief. And then the Korean boy again, still lamenting his sister. It took effort for Teresa not to listen, not to engage, to hold herself to herself, and so that was what she thought Jim was doing too.

For hours, she followed Colonel Tanaka’s lead, weaving in and out of the cave-maze of the station while her mind sparked and slipped. It was like a nightmare she was trying not to wake up from, and the effort kept her from consciously noticing the little things that were wrong with Jim. The way his skin tone had changed. The difference in his eyes. And more than anything, the sense of disconnection, like he was slowly peeling away from what she thought of as reality.

Once he forgot to turn off his mic, and the nonsense he was muttering to himself—I forgot how much I didn’t miss your gnomic cop stories and I hear you and Duarte’s doing the same thing, using people like building blocks for something he wants—spilled out over the radio.

Other times, he seemed almost normal. He checked in on her and how she was doing, the same way he sometimes did on the ship. He talked with Tanaka about how to use heat to find a path for them. At those times, he seemed the way he usually did. Himself. And then they’d start moving, and he would start to drift again.

They found a passage of the same blue-glowing metallic substance as the station’s shell and had started down it when Tanaka opened the private channel between them.

“There’s a conversation that you and I need to have,” the colonel said. “Captain Holden is compromised.”

“We’re all compromised,” Teresa said.

“Not what I’m talking about. He injected himself with a live sample of the protomolecule. The eggheads stabilized it as much as they could, but in my estimation he is losing function quickly.”

Teresa, distracted by the noise in her own head, hadn’t focused on him. She did now. He was beside her, and a little back, his arms at neutral and a small, dreamy smile on his lips. A memory came to her of being in her father’s room, holding his hand, trying to make him understand that Dr. Cortázar was going to kill her. The vagueness and distance were the same.

“He’s fine,” she said, surprised by the heat in her voice.

“I’m not asking for your judgment, I’m informing you of mine,” Tanaka said. “At this point, I believe Holden may still be useful in finding and recovering the high consul, so I’m willing to take the risk associated with his condition. But I need you to understand that this will not always be the case.”

“We’re not leaving him behind.”

“When we locate your father, you will need to make the approach to him. Convince him to stop this thing he’s doing with our minds. That’s what I need you to do.”

“I know.”

“If after that, Captain Holden has continued to decline, I will take any action I feel necessary to keep you and your father safe. I need you to understand what that might entail, because if you get upset, the high consul might too.”

Teresa was quiet for a moment. Understanding exactly what Tanaka was saying was harder than it should have been. I don’t like her, the boy with the missing sister said. She acts calm, but she’s acting. Teresa shook her head, but the sense of presence in her stayed the same. She had an uncomfortable memory of being Tanaka, naked and chemically altered, pinning a man to a bed. She felt his wrists pop. She remembered the pleasure in making the young man hurt. Making him fear her. You will not like the version of me that comes calling on you then.

“You’re saying you’ll kill him?”

“It might come to that, yes. If in my estimation he is compromised enough to pose a threat.”

“He’s not a threat. He won’t be one.”

“I need you to understand that this is a military operation, and my mission is to keep you and your father safe. I will do whatever I need to do to achieve that. Your duty is to approach your father. I will take care of everything after that. Do you understand?”

“I understand.”

“Good.”

Absently, Jim lifted a hand and scratched at the surface of his visor. He didn’t seem aware that he was doing it. The long weeks and months of watching her father change flowed into Teresa. The horror of the sudden snap when the change came, when he went away. When she lost him. I won’t cry in a vac suit, she thought. I am not going to cry in my fucking vac suit.

She tapped her suit’s maneuvering thrusters, just enough to drift close to Jim. She took his hand. For a moment, he didn’t seem to notice, then slowly his gaze swam over to her. His eyes were wrong. There was a shimmering in the whites that hadn’t been there before. That didn’t belong there.

“Don’t fall asleep.”

Jim started to speak, lost focus, started again. A look of frustration came over him, and without warning, he popped the visor off his helmet. He took one long breath, then another. The impulse welled up in Teresa, part defiance of Tanaka, part anger at the universe, part a weird sense of allegiance to the old man who’d plotted to get her killed once and then saved her. Teresa took off her own helmet and hooked it to the strap at her hip. The air in the corridor was oppressively warm and felt strange in her lungs.

When he spoke, she didn’t hear him through the radio, but the open, alien air. I’m not going anywhere. I promise. She knew that wasn’t true, even if he didn’t.

Tanaka’s voice came in a thin, tinny buzz from Jim’s radio and the speakers in the helmet at Teresa’s hip. “What the fuck are you two doing?”

“I was having trouble with my mic,” Jim said. “And my nose itched.”

“Teresa, put your helmet back on.”

Or else what? Teresa thought. She was so tired of being bullied by the people who said they were there to help her. She was so tired of being Laconian. She pretended she couldn’t make out Tanaka’s words, even though they all knew that wasn’t true. Tanaka’s anger was less than her own. When Tanaka opened up her own visor, Teresa felt a little thrill of victory.

“Be ready to put that back in place on my order.”

They turned their attention back to the corridor, the station, the hunt. A few minutes later, out of nowhere, Jim said, What was the trick? He wasn’t talking to either of them.

Tanaka locked her eyes on Teresa’s. I told you there was a problem with him. I told you he was degrading. “When we find him, you make the approach.”

“I understand.”

“I will take care of everything else.”

“I understand.”

“Daddy?”

The months had thinned him, but he hadn’t grown a beard. His cheeks were as smooth-shaved as if Kelly had seen to him that morning. The old pockmarks were evidence of boyhood acne he’d suffered through long before Teresa had known him. His clothes were the same he’d worn at the State Building in Laconia, and they weren’t ragged, but they seemed thin and brittle. Like paper that had been left in the rain and sun.

The black filaments that swirled in from the walls of the great, bright chamber laced into his arms and pierced his side. Tiny pulses ran through them, thickening and thinning. Flickers of blue danced in the black threads and seemed to vanish if she looked directly at them. When he opened his eyes, the irises glowed the same blue as the station, and they focused on nothing, like a blind man’s.

“Daddy?” she repeated, more softly this time.

The lips that had kissed her head as a baby curved into a smile. “Teresa? Is that you?”

“I’m here. I’m right here.”

“It’s going to be all right,” he said. “I dreamed too small before. I see that now. I thought I could save us by organizing, by keeping us together, and I was right about that. I was right, baby. But I didn’t understand how to do it.”

“Look at you,” Teresa said, pointing at the way the station pierced his body through. “Look what it did to you.”

“This is why it will work. The meat, the matter, the rude clay of us. It’s hard to kill. The ones who came before were brilliant, but they were fragile. Genius made of tissue paper, and the chaos blew them apart. We can be the best of both now…”

Teresa shifted closer. Her father, sensing her though his eyes never rested on her, tried to embrace her, but the dark threads held his arms. She put her own arms around him. His skin was burning hot against her cheek.

“We need to get him out of that fucking web,” Tanaka said. “Can he get loose? Ask him if he can get loose.”

“Daddy,” Teresa said. Tears were sheeting over her eyes and turning everything into smears of color and light. “Daddy, we need to go. You need to come with us. Can you do that?”

“No no no, baby. No. This is where I am supposed to be. Where I was always supposed to be. You’ll understand soon, I promise.”

“High Consul Duarte. My name is Colonel Aliana Tanaka. I have been given Omega status by Admiral Trejo and assigned the task of finding and recovering you.”

“We were doomed as soon as the gates appeared,” he said, but to her, not Tanaka. “If no one had taken responsibility, we would have bumbled along until the other ones came and killed us all. I saw that, and I did what I had to do. It was never for me. The empire was only a tool. It was a way to coordinate. To prepare for the war that was coming. The war in heaven.”

A hand touched her shoulder, pulling her gently back. It was Jim, his expression full of sorrow. “Come away. Come on.”

“It’s him. It’s still him.”

“Is and isn’t,” Jim said, and his voice was strange, like the cadence belonged to someone else. “I’ve seen this before. The station’s inside him. What it wants and what he wants? No way to tell one from the other. Not now.”

“You’ve seen this before?” Tanaka said. “Where?”

“On Eros,” Jim said. “Julie was like this. She wasn’t so far gone, but she was just like this.” And then, to Teresa, “I’m sorry, kid. I’m so sorry.”

Teresa blinked the sheet of tears away as best she could. In the distortion, Jim looked odd. The shape of his face seemed changed, bent in a permanent weariness and amusement. She blinked again, and he was only himself.

Tanaka was jetting from side to side, her maneuvering thrusters hissing constantly as she circled the Gothic sculpture that had been Teresa’s father. “I need you to talk to him. He needs to stop this. You have to make him stop this.”

“Colonel, I am right here, and I can hear you,” her father said. He turned his head toward Tanaka, his eyes steady and blank. “And I remember you. You were one of the first with me. You saw Mars die, and you were part of the remaking of it in the empire. This is the continuation of that. This is what we were fighting for all along. We will make all of humanity safe and whole and unified.”

“Sir,” Tanaka said, “we can do this without mindfucking everyone. We can fight this war and still be human beings.”

“You don’t understand, Colonel. But you will.”

Teresa shook herself out of Jim’s grasp. “You don’t have to do this. You can come back.” But she heard the despair in her own voice as she said it.

Her father’s smile was beatific. “It’s all right to let go. Holding on is only pain and weariness. You can let go.”

Teresa felt a wave of nothingness swim through her, an emptiness where her self should be, and she shouted. It wasn’t words or a warning or a threat. It was just her heart screaming because there wasn’t anything else to do. She fired the suit thrusters, slamming herself into the black web that held her father, and she started ripping. Grabbing handfuls of the dark, spiraling filament and yanking it free. The smell of ozone came into the sweltering light like the threat of storms at the edge of a heatwave. Her father shouted and tried to push her away, but the strands held him.

Jim’s voice seemed to come from a great distance. “Teresa! Get away from there! Don’t damage the station!”

Her universe shrank to her body, her vac suit, her father’s compromised flesh, and the alien thing consuming him. He writhed in pain as she tried to tear him free, and screamed for her to stop.

A force grabbed her like a vast, invisible hand and pulled her away. A million tiny, unreal needles bore into her flesh and began to rip her apart. Oh, she thought, my father’s going to kill me.

And then, the pain eased. Jim was beside her, and for a moment someone else was too, but she couldn’t see him. The glimmer in Jim’s eyes was brighter, and his skin had gone waxy with an eerie opalescence under it. His teeth were bared in raw, animal effort.

“He’s gone,” Jim said. It was barely a grunt. “He’s gone. If he’s willing to kill you, it isn’t him anymore. He’s gone.”

Her father—the thing that had been her father—was still held in the black threads. His mouth was open in pain and rage, but no sound came out. The blue fireflies danced along the torn threads like ants from a kicked hill.

“Holden,” Tanaka said. “We have a problem.”

Tanaka had her back to them. Over her shoulder, the wide, bright space was filling with bodies. From every corridor and passage, the alien sentinels were pouring in like smoke.