Oxygen

Breathing, Archie discovered, was something you could hear when it began to fail.

It came first as a slight tightness at the top of the lungs, a need to draw a little deeper, a little oftener. Then it became a sound. By the eighteenth hour of the confinement the whole compartment had acquired a thin whistling edge: four people breathing in and out in the stale half-dark, each with a different rhythm, each a little too fast. Venn's was a deep wheezy rasp. Jin's was shallow and sharp. Zoe's was light, and quick, and just perceptible. His own, he knew without listening, had the old bad rattle in it, the sound of a man whose lungs were already scarred.

It's going to be my lungs that go first, he thought. Of course it is.

The wrist-clock said 38:02:10. The gauge said less.

…

"Say something," said Venn.

He was lying on the floor with his back against a crate and his hands folded on his chest, staring at the ceiling. It was the first time he'd spoken for an hour. The words came out softly. In the dim light his face had taken on a gray hollowness, and the bones stood out under the dark skin.

"Like what?" said Zoe.

"I don't know. Anything. Tell me about the bow."

"The bow?"

"Where you learned it. I never asked." He turned his head with an effort. "I'd like to know. I'd like to know what a person's like who's good at something and doesn't tell anyone."

Zoe was silent a moment. Then she gave a small crooked smile, and settled back against the shelves.

"Summer camp," she said. "In Vermont. I was twelve. My mother signed me up, because she thought I needed to get out of the apartment." She drew her knees up. "I hated it. I hated everything about it. I was the only kid who'd brought a book to a lake. But there was this archery range, back behind the mess hall, and it was always empty. Nobody liked it. Too hot, too boring. And there was a counselor, a big gray-haired woman named Mrs. Delacroix, who ran it. She never talked. She just handed me a bow."

"And?"

"And I hit the target. First arrow. It wasn't the bullseye, it was nowhere near, but I hit it. And she looked at me and said, 'Well, now. There's a thing.'" Zoe laughed, softly, wetly. "That was it. That was the whole speech. I went back every day for six weeks. I think I loved it because nobody expected me to say anything."

"That's a good reason," said Venn.

"What about you?"

"What about me?"

"What do you love? That nobody knows?"

Venn closed his eyes. He was quiet for so long that Archie thought he'd fallen asleep.

"Running," he said at last.

Nobody spoke.

"I used to run. Before the leg. Before all of it." His voice had gone strange and faraway. "I wasn't fast. I was never fast. But I ran every morning, five a.m., through Piedmont Park, in Atlanta, before the city woke up. You could smell the grass. Sprinklers on. Nobody there. Just me and the mist, and my feet going." He swallowed. "I thought I was going to be a model, you know. I thought that was the whole of it. But I was happy in the mornings, man. I was never so happy as in those mornings. And I never told anyone."

"You're telling us," said Jin.

"Yeah." Venn's lips curved. "Yeah. Guess I am."

"Then you'll run again," said Zoe fiercely. "You're going to run. I'll hold the stopwatch."

"I'll take that bet."

"I'll take your bet."

They both laughed, weakly, and the sound dissolved in a cough.

…

At the twenty-fourth hour, Jin said it aloud.

"There's no way out."

He had been sitting with his back against the door, his injured hand wrapped in a strip of coverall, his glasses crooked on his nose. He had spent a good part of a day pulling the vent cover off its hinges and staring into the dark behind it. Now he put the cover down on the grating and looked at the three of them. His eyes, behind the lenses, were red-rimmed and perfectly calm.

"I'd like to be wrong. I'd like to say that I've missed something. But I've been over every circuit, every pipe, every fuse. I've counted the seconds on the gauge. I've done the math, three times. The oxygen in this room will last another twenty-two hours at the current rate. If we all stay very still, perhaps twenty-six." He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. "There's no way out. I'm sorry."

"Don't say that," said Zoe.

"I have to."

"Jin—"

"I'm not saying it to hurt you. I'm saying it because it's true, and I think we ought to be allowed to hear it." He put the glasses back on. "I've been trying to fix problems for twenty years. Most of them had solutions. This doesn't. We walked into it. It was a trap, and the door has closed, and I can't open it." He looked at Archie. "I'm not blaming you."

"I am," said Archie.

"Don't."

"I can't help it."

"Bro." Venn had raised himself on one elbow. His voice was ragged but gentle. "Bro. Don't go emo on me. We've got twenty hours. Think of something."

"There's nothing to think of."

"Then think of nothing. Think of it really hard."

Archie stared at him. Then, against all reason, a laugh broke out of him: a short, painful, startled thing, like a cough. Venn grinned. Zoe's shoulders began to shake. And for a moment, all four of them sat laughing, in the red dark of a steel box in the sky, laughing till their sides ached, while the needle went on falling.

…

The intercom clicked at the thirtieth hour.

Archie had been expecting it. He'd been half dreaming of it, lying with his cheek against the cold steel, drifting at the edge of consciousness. He raised his head.

"I'm sorry," said Gregor.

The voice was close, as if he were standing just outside. It was very quiet. There was none of the flat courtesy in it now, none of the polish. It was the voice of an old tired man in a very small room.

"I'm sorry. I want to say it again. I don't know how else to." A long breath. "I sat up there and I watched the gauge. I told myself I'd stop at forty. And then thirty. And then I told myself I'd only wait a little." He gave a short, harsh laugh. "I think I'm a coward. I think I've been a coward for fifteen years."

"Gregor," said Archie. He crawled forward and laid both hands on the grille. "Listen to me. You can still stop. You can open the door. You don't have to do this."

"I do, though."

"No—"

"He said I'd go home." Gregor's voice cracked. "He said he'd open the door for me. He said that once you were gone, I could just walk out. He said it's all a simulation and I've been the only one who's real." A shuddering breath. "I know he's lying. Part of me knows. But it's the only door anyone's ever offered me, son. Fifteen years, and the only door."

"He's lying!" Archie was shouting. His voice cracked and broke. "Gregor, he's lying! His name is William! He's the man from the lab! He doesn't want to let you out, he wants the data! He wants every consciousness that comes through here, every brain scan, every heartbeat, and he wants to sell it! He's using you! He's using all of us!"

"Maybe."

"Not maybe! Yes!"

"Maybe," said Gregor. "But I've made up my mind."

The intercom crackled. "I'm sorry," he said again. And then, very low, almost too soft to hear: "Tell Carol I tried."

It went dead.

Archie slid down the wall.

…

Time stopped meaning anything.

Somewhere past the thirty-sixth hour, Jin began, quietly, to write on the wall. He had found a scrap of chalk in a crate and he stood with his back to the others, crabbed over, his good hand moving in short precise strokes. Archie watched him for a long time before he understood what he was doing. It was code. It was line after line of it, dense and compact, cascading down the steel in columns. Jin wrote with a kind of fierce tenderness, pausing now and then to correct a character, to wipe a smudge, to stand back and consider.

"What is it?" said Archie.

"A message."

"To who?"

"To Luca." Jin did not turn. "The Dimension is routing everything through William's feed. But there's an old channel. Elena's. The one we heard in the throne room, when you were talking to her. That signal came out the other side. Luca heard it." His voice was steady, his hand never wavering. "If there's an old route, a first route, one that William didn't install and doesn't control, then somewhere on this station there's a transmitter that talks to it."

"Where?"

"I don't know. But I know what it would look like." He tapped the wall. "It would look like a distress beacon. Every ship has one. It's the first thing they put in. A dumb little signal, a broadcast, a message in a bottle." He wiped his brow with the heel of his wrist. "I can't reach it. I can't get out. But I can write it. And if I write it right, and the system's still listening, it might just..."

"Might what?"

"Wake up. Might send itself." Jin gave a faint tired smile. "It's a long shot."

"It's a good shot," said Archie.

"It's a shot."

He turned back to the wall, and kept writing.

…

Behind them, in the dark, Zoe had put her arm round Venn.

He had gone very still. His breath came in short shallow sips, and his eyes were closed, and his hand lay open on the grating, palm up, as if offering something to the air. He was smiling slightly. She held him, with her chin on his shoulder, humming something wordless and low.

It was the lullaby. Thomas's. Nell's.

Archie could not tell whether she knew she was doing it.

He crossed the floor on his knees. His head had begun to swim, a slow dizzy tide, and the edges of the room were going soft. He lowered himself next to them, and put his hand on Venn's chest, and felt the heartbeat there. It was faint. It was steady.

"I'm okay," Venn murmured. "I'm okay. Just tired."

"I know."

"Is it morning?"

"Not yet."

"Good." Venn's smile deepened. "I want to see the sun. I want to run in it. One more morning."

"You will," said Archie.

He had no right to say it. He said it anyway. His eyes were burning.

Over Venn's head, Zoe looked at him. Her eyes were dark and wet and full of something that he did not have a name for. She didn't say a word.

She didn't need to.