Drift

Venn went first, as everyone had known he would.

He was the biggest of them. His lungs were the largest, and drank the most air, and had been damaged more deeply than any of them knew. He had hidden it well. For all those hours he'd held the cough down, and the pain behind the ribs, and the creeping blue at the edge of his lips. But toward the end of the forty-first hour, his breathing, which had been slow and shallow and even, simply stopped. There was no struggle. There was only a small soft sound, like a sigh, and the hand that lay open on the grating curled gently closed.

"Venn?" said Zoe.

He did not answer.

"Venn. Venn. Wake up. It's not morning yet—"

She had her ear against his chest. She was shaking him. Archie, who had been lying very still with his eyes shut, felt the sound go through him like a blade, and could not move. His limbs were lead. The room swam. It was as if he were looking at the scene through a long dim tube, and the people at the other end were very small and very far.

"He's not dead," said Jin. His voice was wrong, slurred and thick. "He's unconscious. His body's shut down to preserve—"

"Then wake him up!"

"I can't."

"Do something!"

"There's nothing to do!"

Zoe lay across Venn's chest and sobbed. She sobbed without noise, shuddering, her short hair in her face. Her hand was knotted in the front of his coverall. She said his name again and again, in a whisper, and he did not stir. His face was calm. The ghost of a smile still rested on it, as if he'd gone running somewhere, a long way off, in the early green mist.

…

Jin kept writing.

He had stopped speaking, and stopped moving, except for the hand. It rose and fell on the wall with a mechanical patience, dragging down the steel in short bright strokes of chalk. Line after line. Column after column. His head was bowed. His shoulders had sagged until his forehead rested against the metal. Archie, from the floor, could see his lips moving.

He was reciting. He was saying the code aloud as he wrote it, softly, in a thin dry whisper, the way a child recites the alphabet. If beacon is null. Else broadcast. Retry. Retry. Retry.

"Jin," Archie said.

The chalk paused.

"Jin, stop. Rest. You're using up—"

"Not yet."

"You'll—"

"Not yet." The whisper was fierce. "It's nearly done. It's nearly. I need one more line. One more. Just give me one more."

He drew a long unsteady breath. He lifted the chalk. His hand trembled so badly that he had to hold his wrist with the other. He wrote a single symbol. He added a second. He stood back, slowly, with the chalk dropping out of his fingers, and looked at the wall.

Then he laughed, very softly.

"There," he said. "I think that's it."

He turned. His eyes met Archie's. They were bright and hollow and astonishingly calm, and for a moment the old Jin looked out of them, the dry, fastidious, brilliant man who corrected people's spelling and nodded when he was pleased.

"Thank you," said Jin Park, "for asking me to come."

"I didn't—"

"You did. In the end." The smile deepened. "I was going to say no. In the corridor, at the lab. I'd decided. I thought, I'm a dead man, what's the use. But you looked so frightened. And I thought, he could use a friend." He swayed on his feet. "It's been... it's been the best month of my life. I want you to know that."

"Jin—"

"I mean it. I've never had so many people look at me and not want me to be anything else."

He folded to the floor, gently, with his back against the wall, under the glowing chalk columns of his message. He took off his glasses and set them neatly beside him. Then he closed his eyes.

"Tell Luca," he whispered. "Tell him it's good code."

…

In the lab, the screen lit up.

It was not much. It was a faint, flickering, pale-green flicker at the bottom of the main console, a line of characters crawling up through the static. Otis Brennan, bent over his keyboard at four o'clock in the morning with his glasses fogged, almost missed it.

Then he saw the characters.

"Luca," he said, in a strange voice. "Luca."

Luca Ferrara was across the room in four strides. He had not slept in two days. He stood behind Otis's chair with both hands on the back of it, staring at the screen. A single line of text was repeating, over and over, in a monospaced typeface so old that it could have come from a museum.

DISTRESS. DISTRESS. DISTRESS. MERIDIAN-7. OXYGEN. WILLIAM. WILLIAM. WILLIAM.

"It's Jin," said Otis. "That's Jin's syntax. That's how he comments his loops. It's a beacon. He's wired a beacon into the old channel, he's—"

"Can we reach them?"

"I can't. Not from here. I don't have the access. The Gate's locked from the other end." Otis's hands flew over the keys. "I'll try an override. I'll try the first-channel protocol. I'll—" He stopped. "It's not letting me in."

"Why not?"

"Someone's changed the credentials." The words came out in a whisper. "Luca. Someone's changed the administrator passwords. This morning. Somebody else is running the Gate."

They both turned.

At the far end of the lab, in the glass doorway of the observation suite, stood William Cross. His tablet was tucked beneath one arm. He had been listening. He did not look surprised. He looked, rather, as if he'd been waiting for them to look round.

"Gentlemen," he said gently. "I'm afraid there's been a misunderstanding."

…

Back on Meridian-7, in the dark, the air was very thin.

Archie lay on his side with his cheek on the cold grating. He could no longer feel his hands. The caged bulb had gone out an hour ago; the only light in the compartment came from the chalk on the wall, which glowed faintly, ghostly green, in the dark. Jin's message. His last gift.

It might get through, Archie thought. It might. Someone might hear.

He did not believe it. But he found it a comfort to think so.

Beside him, Zoe lay curled on her side. She had not spoken for a while. Her eyes were closed, and her lips were pale. One hand was still wound in the cloth of Venn's coverall, as if she'd fallen asleep holding on to a rope. The other lay on the floor between her and Archie, palm up, fingers curled.

He looked at it for a long time.

Then, with an effort that seemed to take all that was left of him, he reached out and laid his own hand in it.

Her fingers closed.

"Hey," whispered Zoe.

"Hey."

"You're still here."

"I'm still here."

"I'm glad." Her eyes opened, a crack. They were dark and soft and very tired, and in the green dimness he saw them fill, and spill. "I'm sorry I didn't say it. Back at the door. I should have said I thought it was a bad idea."

"You did say."

"I said all right."

"That's what I heard," said Archie. "It was my mistake. It's my mistake, Zoe. I want you to know that. Not yours. Not Jin's. Mine. I was so sure I knew how it worked. I thought I'd learned it." A cracked laugh. "Three weeks in, and I thought I'd learned how to be a person."

"You were a person."

"I was a man in a hurry."

"That's a person." She smiled. A tear ran sideways over the bridge of her nose. "That's all anyone is."

The chalk on the wall flickered.

"I wish I'd drawn you," said Archie.

"What?"

"Back in the castle. In the village. I had a pencil in my hand and I never once..." He took a shallow breath. "I wanted to. I wanted to draw you in the dress. The red one. It was so ridiculous, and you looked so happy, and I thought, I should keep this, and I never did." His eyes were closing. "I'm sorry. I think that's the thing I'm sorriest for."

"Draw it now."

"I don't have anything."

"Draw it in the air. I'll watch."

He lifted his free hand, slowly, as though through water. He traced a curve in the dark: a shoulder, a collar, a waist. A skirt that flared. A tilted chin. His finger left no mark. There was nothing on the air but a faint glow of the chalk. But Zoe watched with great seriousness, lying on her side with her cheek on her arm, and when he had finished she said, softly:

"It's lovely."

"It's not finished."

"It's lovely anyway."

…

At the last, they were the only two awake.

The compartment was silent. Venn lay with his hand over his heart. Jin sat under his wall of code with his head bowed. The air had grown thick and sweet, the way a room gets when it has been breathed for a long time, and Archie's thoughts were coming slowly now, one by one, like beads drawn on a string.

Ready?

No.

Me neither.

He wasn't afraid. He wondered at that. He had been afraid all his life, of everything, of rooms and eyes and endings. And now that the thing itself was here, folding down over him like a blanket, he found that what he felt was only a vast and loosening quiet.

"Zoe."

"Mm."

"At least... it's not alone."

Her hand tightened.

"At least," she said.

She was smiling when her eyes closed.

Archie lay for a moment longer. He heard, or thought he heard, very faint and far away, a sound like a piano, one note and then another, picking its way along a melody that never quite came to the end. He thought of a bar in the rain. He thought of a man in a tweed jacket with a pencil stub in his hand, saying Draw something. Don't wait.

I'm sorry, he thought. I'm sorry, Thomas.

Then the green light of the wall went dark.

And the station drifted on, silent and unlit, over the pale blue world, with its engines cold and its air spent and its viewport full of unwinking stars. Somewhere deep within it, in some chamber that had never been built, four people dreamed of breathing. They dreamed it forever. They dreamed of a morning in a park, and a lake in Vermont, and a mountain in Korea, and a maple forest in New Hampshire, in autumn, with the leaves coming down. They dreamed a great many beautiful things.

And not one of them ever woke.